2012 Directed by Sarah Polley
Canadian actress and filmmaker Sarah Polley investigates certain secrets related to her mother, interviewing a group of family members and friends whose reliability varies depending of their implication in the events, which are remembered in different ways; so a trail of questions remains to be answered, because memory is always changing and the discovery of truth often depends on who is telling the tale.
Michael Polley Harry Gulkin Susy Buchan John Buchan Mark Polley Joanna Polley Cathy Gulkin Marie Murphy Robert MacMillan Anne Tait Deirdre Bowen Victoria Mitchell Mort Ransen Geoffrey Bowes Tom Butler Pixie Bigelow Claire Walker Rebecca Jenkins Peter Evans Alex Hatz Justin Goodhand Seamus Morrison Allie MacDonald Lani Billard Andrew Church Dave Kiner Jeff Mallory Kristen Corvers Christine Horne Show All…
莎拉波莉家庭詩篇, Histórias que Contamos, Apáim története, Historie rodzinne, Les Histoires qu'on raconte
Moving relationship stories Faith and religion Humanity and the world around us documentary, fascinating, sad, emotional or heartbreaking family, emotional, touching, emotion or kids emotional, emotion, family, moving or feelings artists, biography, musician, songs or emotional surfing, teenager, friendship, adolescents or kids Show All…
This movie was even more beautifully sad than watching a guy on the subway ride home eat an entire Papa John's pizza by himself.
And let me tell you my friends, that was a mighty sad sight (he was using the dipping sauce -- or at least that's how I remember it).
"i swatted my fly!"
yes. unremarkable by nature, remarkable by design. Kiarostami 101, but indelibly articulates schism of being / remembering.
works in spite of itself, at times. but then again, don't we all?
also, it may not really count, but Polley includes what i'd like to consider to be the greatest credits stinger of all time.
cried (and cried and cried) and didn’t know why until i realized nobody sees a person the same way, and that’s exactly what allows us to see them as fully as we can. what we see is just a fraction, and maybe the truth seems like too much to bear or that it’ll shrink us. but when the pieces come together, we see that everything had to happen the way it did — or none of it would’ve happened at all.
you know a film is going straight for the jugular when "skinny love" plays right at the beginning
Completely riveted by Polley's reconstruction of a family secret from multiple angles until the degree to which she was aestheticizing her life became clear. At a certain point, she comes out and tells us the themes of the documentary—in that respect, the last 20 minutes of the film are like the psychiatrist scene in Psycho.
The only way this movie could have been more made for me is if the opening credits included a dedication that read: "This movie was made for Adam Kempenaar."
Full discussion available here.
A few notes that didn't make it into the conversation:
- A perfectly Polley-esque touch that I failed to mention about my autobiographical short film... My wife, then girlfriend, played the younger version of my mom.
- A key to the success of this film, I believe, is Polley's obvious fairness, generosity of spirit and lack of guile. Everything we see is a capital-C construct with her as the puppet master, but there's no overriding sense of calculation that might come through with other directors. It's all…
“It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.”
A metaphorical, bottomless pool of a tale that grows more complex the further in you dive. The quest to know one’s origin plays as the surface-level focus but slowly that focus begins to also encapsulate the greater study of human memory and how it is warped by individual perceptions.
Beautiful, vulnerable, and stunning to witness. The final fifteen minutes took the breath out of my lungs. Sarah Polley delivers a documentary that appears almost lighthearted on the surface but once it’s drawn you in, Stories We Tell drowns you in its complex emotions.
An instant favorite.
my favourite form of documentary for which - as a sensational entity - very likely could manifest in volumes of theatrics almost certainly as if contrived in a capacity of fiction; but, however, beautifully rendered with such a palpable reality that such pure emotions could never be manufactured.
In Stories We Tell, director Sarah Polley attempts what I think is the impossible. She attempts to create a documentary of her family story. By all accounts this shouldn’t work, as the decisions that the documentarian makes when crafting the narrative cannot possibly be objective. In this age of Moore type ‘documentaries’, where the opinions and agendas of the documentarian overshadow any semblance of balance and objectivity, Polly could have easily strayed into grey zone of ‘truth’. But she didn’t. At all. Instead, she made the question of how to find the truth when presented with different recounts of the same stories one of the central themes.
The declaration of the search for how to find the truth in the…
remembering is reconstructing in equal parts fact & fiction. the goal is never to get to the bottom of a memory, just to let it be told in all its variations.
