‘The crucial function of art is to find the truth...’
Within every family lurks a drama or a dark secret. You all know them. We all have them. And they could all make for a fascinating documentary. The problem with these stories is that our memory is not infallible. In fact, it is positively unreliable. Much of our memory is a warped and distorted version of the truth. And so, if you ask a group of people all to recall the same event, you will get multiple different versions of the same story. Kurosawa knew this and that’s how we ended up with Rashomon. Actor and filmmaker Sarah Polley knows this too…
Stories We Tell sees Polley examine her mother’s life. Her affairs. Her passions. Her innermost thoughts and feelings. But she does this through the lens of various friends, family members and lovers. The resulting film is an examination of myth and memory. A treatise on the truthism that everyone is a storyteller. And for the person spinning the yarn, every word is always true. The danger here, of course, is that this kind of project can easily become exploitative and crass. Happily, Polley handles her subjects with warmth and kindness, particularly the interviews with family patriarch Michael Polley – and it is these scenes where Stories We Tell really comes to life and we start to question if it is the stories that matter or the people that we share them with.
The trials and tribulations of the Polley family are no different to that of millions of other families out there trying to navigate the daily grind of existence. And this is what makes Stories We Tell so successful. We can relate to this tangled web and apply it to our own situation. In doing so, Polley has created that rarest of things, a film that is truly universal. It is also unlike any other documentary out there. Well worth checking out.