Stories We Tell

Stories We Tell revolves around a few key questions: Who was my mother? Who is my father? Have I been told the truth? What is truth? Subjective questions indeed, but such is the formal inventiveness of Sarah Polley’s new film and its deft interplay of subjectivities, that subjectivity itself is transcended. That, dear audience, is art.

“Stories We Tell, a remarkable movie by the Canadian actress and filmmaker Sarah Polley, blends factual inquiry and something else—not quite fiction, but also not really documentary—to astonishing effect. I hesitate to say too much, since the movie is built around a series of formal and substantive revelations that must be seen to be believed. The story Ms. Polley has to tell is intensely personal, and in trying to verify some elusive facts about her mother (an actress who died in 1987) she comes close to unraveling her own sense of identity. She may not be who she thought she was, and Stories We Tell is decidedly not what it seems, at first, to be."—A.O. Scott, New York Times

“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, Guardian

“I’m happily going out on a limb to predict Sarah Polley’s astonishing new film will not only land an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature, but also one for Best Picture. Yes, it’s that good. I write this fully knowing that no doc has ever been nominated for the Academy’s top prize, but then Stories We Tell makes ’documentary’ seem the most limiting of labels. Polley’s brave quest to uncover her family’s deepest secrets unfolds like a thriller, one where the resolution is literally part of her DNA. It’s an intimate film of truth, memory and reconciliation, not just for Polley and her family but also for astonished viewers. Polley isn’t just a Canadian talent, she’s a Canadian treasure.”—Peter Howell, Toronto Star