“I’m interested in the way we tell stories about our lives. About the fact that the truth about the past is often ephemeral and difficult to pin down,” says Sarah Polley in the enigmatic and affectionate documentary “Stories We Tell.” Memory and how things are remembered becomes a central subject in her film but there’s much more. It unfolds like a detective story in search of the truth. It’s also a multi-layered love story that spreads its branches across an entire family and those near it – and it’s also about loyalty and trust. Most fascinating for this film lover: the way the film has been put together — it is a thing of wonder. She experiments with the medium and the genre – twisting it at her will. It’s like no documentary I’ve seen before – and a reason to rejoice.
Sarah Polley is the Canadian actress who got international acclaim for her performance in Atom Egoyan’s Academy Award nominated film “The Sweet Hereafter” (1997), followed by a role in Doug Liman’s “Go” (1999) which positioned her for stardom. After being cast in Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous” (2000) in the iconic role of Penny Lane, she walked away from the project. “I could never be like this beautiful movie star who’s completely charismatic, who the audience falls in love with, who all the guys in the story fall in love with,” she told Total Film Magazine about dropping out. Instead she did a low-budget Canadian film “The Law of Enclosures.” She started directing short films and made her feature film directorial debut with “Away From Her” (2006). Based on a short story by Alice Munro, the film is about a woman losing her memory due to Alzheimer’s disease. Polley was nominated for the Oscar for her screenplay and the star of the film, Julie Christie, was nominated for Best Actress.
“Stories We Tell” is about Sarah Polley’s family – in particular about her mother – Diane – who died of cancer on January 10, 1990 when Sarah was eleven years old. Both her parents were actors and raconteurs – a characteristic that is shared with all of her siblings, including Susy and John Buchan from Diane’s first marriage, and Mark and Joanna Polley from her second marriage to Michael Polley – who became an insurance agent after Diane and he started a family. As a child Sarah was teased that she didn’t look like the rest of the family – a fact that everyone found amusing. At first attempting to learn more about her mother, she starts interviewing people about her. Her mother was bigger than life to everyone. “What was happening in her life at the moment that was what she was talking about,” says one of her friends. Her father didn’t have the drive to continue pursuing acting and writing, but her mother blazed away doing theatre gigs that took her away from home weeks at a time. She became pregnant with Sarah in her early 40s. She thought about having an abortion, but changed her mind on the way to the clinic. After her death, Michael was very depressed but found consolation in raising Sarah, with whom he developed a deep bond. It is at this juncture in the film that Sarah starts to uncover truths that will affect the entire family. It is a tender, complex and emotional tale that keeps widening in scope as it progresses.
The remarkable aspect of the film is how Polley goes about distilling all of the information and conveying it to us. She interviews all of the family members separately – and encourages her dad to write down his version of the story. She asks him to perform it in a recording studio and directs him during this process, at times asking him to repeat passages. She uses his recording as a narrative thread for the film. She also has a treasure trove of home movies and since her mother was an actress Sarah has footage of her acting. Additionally, she recreates pivotal scenes with actors who look uncannily like the real thing and shoots them in super 8 so they have the feel of home movies. One of my favorite passages is when the plot of “Marriage Italian Style” – the Vittorio De Sica film — gets woven into the chronicle. There are sections that recreate the past that are very moving. At times they have the feel and mood of a silent movie including piano accompaniment. This collage of voices and creative film styles evoke consciousness, perception, identity and memory. There’s a powerful argument about who has the right to tell their history. And so many questions and thoughts linger after the movie ends. It’s a brave and stunning act that Polley has done with this. It’s a love letter to her parents – as well as a way for her to reclaim her own story.
Susy: “It does sort of make you alter the way that you look at your relationship. A truth like that that opens up kind of begets other truths. And when you discover truths like that, how you think about truths within that are concealed.”
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on Amazon Prime, YouTube and Tubi and to rent on iTunes, Vudu, Redbox, FandangoNOW, Microsoft and Google Play.
Written by Sarah Polley
Directed by Sarah Polley
Starring Michael Polley, Harry Gulkin, Susy Buchan, John Buchan, Mark Polley, Joanna Polley, Cathy Gulkin, Marie Murphy
108 minutes
Writer and Director Sarah Polley on Bringing “Stories We Tell” to the Screen
“I think what kind of captivated me about what was happening in the aftermath of this story in my own life was the way we were all telling the stories about it, and the way those stories were different from each other. There are these huge gaps between these stories we were telling, both in terms of the fact of them, but also in terms of the perspective and what we decided were the most important elements of it. I got really transfixed by this idea that it was so necessary for us to be able to tell this story to make sense of some kind of basic confusion we had in our life. I just started thinking of storytelling as a really basic human need and wanted to make a film about that, I think…I think what I found really difficult was I felt like I didn’t have a model for it, so I felt like there were a lot of films that really inspired me. It’s not like I was breaking new ground. Films like ‘The Five Obstructions’ by Lars Von Trier or ‘F for Fake’ by Orson Welles… people have been experimenting with this form for a really long time, but I did feel like I didn’t have…
…Usually when you make a film, you don’t have films in your mind that you’re emulating hopefully, but you know that you have something to think about in terms of what you’re aspiring to and this really felt like grappling in the dark. Like I really felt like I had no idea what this was going to be and what it was going to look like. I had a basic sense of the feel of it and the ideas I wanted to explore and a tone, but it was very hard to imagine it before it was completely done…I mean I was really nervous about exposing myself, but I think more so nervous about exposing my family. I was just worried too, like if you haven’t been in the public eye and you put yourself out there and you say things and they are interpreted in another way that you mean or you don’t say things as clearly as you’d like or they are misinterpreted. I got really worried about putting people in that position who weren’t used to it. So that was a really terrifying aspect of the film.” (slashfilm.com)
Polley on the Making of “Stories We Tell”
“So we started with the interview with my dad, and that was about four days, and then I spent weeks just watching that material and pulling threads out of it that lead me to figure out what stories I wanted to focus on in the film…I think it just sort of happened. We were recording my dad in the recording studio reading his writing and we decided just last minute to film it as well and then we decided more or less to put a camera on me at the same time. I didn’t think I was ever going to use that footage, so the fact that I included myself, I think what happened was I decided that I did need to be in the film in some way. I wasn’t comfortable with doing a “voice of god” from my perspective. I actually thought that that was besides the point, but I did want to include myself as the character of the filmmaker, the investigator, the person who was trying to get to the bottom of things.” (slashfilm.com)
About Writer and Director Sarah Polley
Sarah Polley was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada…As a child actor, her natural and unaffected performances on television series such as CBC’s “Road to Avonlea” (1990–96) and in films such as “Atom Egoyan’s Exotica” (1994) and “The Sweet Hereafter” (1997) possessed a maturity and intelligence that belied her age and established her as a rising star. The daughter of casting director and actress Diane Polley and British-born actor-turned-insurance-salesman Michael Polley, Sarah Polley was the youngest of five children. She began acting at age four and made her film debut in Philip Borsos’s “One Magic Christmas” (1985). She then appeared in several films and television series before scoring leading roles in Terry Gilliam’s epic fantasy “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (1988) and the PBS children’s series “Ramona” (1988).
Polley won the starring role of Sara Stanley in the CBC TV series “Road to Avonlea” (1990–96). When not being tutored on the set, she attended the Claude Watson Arts Program at Earl Haig Secondary School in Toronto. During that time she began to become politically active. After delivering memorable performances in Egoyan’s “Exotica” (1994) and an episode of the children’s series “Straight Up” (1996), at age 17 she left school and quit acting to devote herself to left-wing political activism, a period that lasted several years. Polley worked as part of New Democratic Party candidate Mel Watkins’s unsuccessful 1997 federal election campaign. She also volunteered for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and the anti-nuclear organizations Canadian Peace Alliance and Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament.
She accepted a key role in Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter” (1997) as a break from her activist work. She expected that working with Egoyan would make a good coda to her acting career, but instead the film began a new era for her as an artist. In addition to bringing her international attention and Genie Award nominations for best actress and best original song, the Oscar-nominated film made Polley realize that acting could be significant and socially relevant, and it marked a clear transition for her from child actor to adult star. Polley contributed supporting performances to a number of significant films by prominent Canadian directors, such as Thom Fitzgerald’s “The Hanging Garden” (1997), Clement Virgo’s “The Planet of Junior Brown” (1997), Don McKellar’s “Last Night”(1998), and David Cronenberg’s “eXistenZ” (1999). She seemed poised for stardom in the United States after her work in Doug Liman’s “Go” (1999) and Audrey Wells’s “Guinevere” (1999) earned her rave reviews and major industry buzz. Yet she eschewed mainstream fame and gave her allegiance instead to the Canadian film industry, backing out of the star-making role of Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe’s Oscar-winning “Almost Famous” (2000) to star in John Greyson’s cryptic “The Law of Enclosures” (2000). She continued to work in unconventional and independent films, such as Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Weight of Water” (2000), Michael Winterbottom’s “The Claim” (2000), and Hal Hartley’s “No Such Thing” (2001). After starring in Zack Snyder’s hit zombie movie “Dawn of the Dead” (2004) and Wim Wenders’s “Don’t Come Knocking” (2005), she co-starred with Gerard Butler and Stellan Skarsgård in Sturla Gunnarsson’s “Beowulf & Grendel” (2006). She also worked in television, appearing with her father in the critically acclaimed Canadian TV series “Slings and Arrows” (2006) and with Paul Giamatti in the award-winning HBO mini-series “John Adams” (2008). Although her political work had slowed after her return to acting in the late 1990s, in 2003 Toronto Mayor David Miller appointed her to his transition advisory team.
At age 20, Polley wrote and directed her first short film, “Don’t Think Twice” (1999), a black comedy about a man (Tom McCamus) who is forced to choose between his lover and his family. In 2001 she attended the Canadian Film Centre’s Director’s Lab. Her second short, “I Shout Love” (2001), won a Genie Award for Best Live Action Short Drama. She then wrote and directed “Away from Her” (2006), her adaptation of Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Went over the Mountain,” for which she earned an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay. Starring Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie as a married couple coping with Alzheimer’s disease and a lingering history of infidelity, the film won six major Genie Awards, including those for best motion picture, adapted screenplay, and achievement in direction. “Away from Her” also earned Polley the prestigious Claude Jutra Award for best feature film by a first-time director and picked up dozens of international honours. Her 2011 feature film, “Take This Waltz,” which she wrote and directed, was named one of Canada’s Top Ten features of the year by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), as was her next film, the highly personal documentary “Stories We Tell” (2012), which explored the nuances of her family’s history. In addition to winning the Genie Award for Best Feature Length Documentary, it was named best documentary of the year by numerous critics and organizations. Polley later co-wrote the TV miniseries “Alias Grace” (2017), which was based on the novel by Margaret Atwood. In 2015 Polley was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. (britannica.com)