Stories We Tell

Showtimes: 

No screenings currently scheduled.

Go to the official site

108 min.

Directed by: 

Sarah Polley

Starring: 

Documentary Feature

Rated Parental Guidance; Language May Offend, Tobacco Use.

Stories We Tell is a movie you will want to see several times. It seems like a regular documentary, but by the end of the film, the doctrine and purity of ‘documentary’ has disappeared. This is in every sense a ‘story film’, and a great one, that lives up to the Neruda quoted in it: ‘Love is so short. Forgetting is so long.’

– David Thomson, The Guardian

Read Sarah Polley's own account of how this personal documentary came to be:
http://blog.nfb.ca/2012/08/29/stories-we-tell-a-post-by-sarah-polley/

In this inspired, genre-twisting film, Oscar-nominated writer/director Sarah Polley discovers that the truth depends on who’s telling it. Polley is both filmmaker and detective as she investigates the secrets behind a family of storytellers. She playfully interrogates a cast of characters of varying reliability, eliciting refreshingly candid, yet mostly contradictory, answers to the same questions.

As each relates their version of the family mythology, present-day recollections shift into nostalgia-tinged glimpses of a lively, fun-loving past and the shadows just beneath. Polley unravels the paradoxes to reveal the essence of family: a messy, intense and loving tangle of contradictions.

Stories We Tell explores the elusive nature of truth and memory, but at its core is a deeply personal film about how our narratives shape and define us as individuals and families, all interconnecting to paint a profound, funny and poignant picture of the larger human story.

– National Film Board of Canada