Taking over half-a-decade between her stellar debut Away From Her and her middling Take This Waltz, directer Sarah Polley is wasting no time before debuting her next feature. After premiering her Michelle Williams-led tale of infidelity at Toronto International Film Festival last year, it was announced this week that Polley would be returning in 2012 with her first documentary.
Stories We Tell takes a look at family in a series of interconnecting stories, pulled out by Polley as interviewer. As with any family, there’s a mix of truth and lies which seems to convey the nature of such flesh and blood relations greater than any sincere approach could get at. We’ve got the first clip today, which dives into a conversation with the patriarch, as we get a sense for Polley’s style here. Check it out below.
Synopsis:
In this exploration of the elusive nature of truth and memory, Oscar-nominated writer/director Sarah Polley (Away from Her) 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.
TIFF kicks off on September 6th.