Stories We Tell at Thame Cinema 4 All this week

THE film showing this Saturday, October 19, at The Players Theatre, Nelon Street, Thame, will be the Canadian film, Stories We Tell, Directed by  Sarah Polley.  It is 108 minutes long and is a  12A Certificate

Shot from ‘Stories We Tell’ showing at Thame Cinema 4 All on Saturday

“I’m interested in the way we tell stories about our lives, about the fact that the truth about the past is often ephemeral and difficult to pin down,” Canadian actor turned director, Sarah Polley, has said.  She lost her mother to cancer when she was 11 years old.

Diane Polley was a once famous television personality, a beautiful, free spirited and vivacious woman who enchanted everyone she met. Then, 23 years after her mother’s death, Sarah decided to make a documentary to piece together the unknowns about her mothers’ life – part memoir, part memorial, and part excavation of her own back story. Sitting down with relatives and friends and encouraging them to talk about what they remembered of Diane, the project soon turned into a far more complex excavation of myth, rumour and the unique intricacies of family relationships and recollections accumulated over years. Using a mixture of her father’s Super-8 footage, faux home movies, interviews and archive material, Polley’s film unfolds like an increasingly compelling mystery, and is her most complex and poignant film to date, sophisticated, beguiling and gripping.

It is an absorbing meditation of the persistence of the past in the present, and the unknowability of other people’s lives. Occasionally there are gems that sneak into the cinemas without fanfare, get universal rave reviews and then disappear before you have a chance to get to the nearest cinema during an inexplicably brief run. This is one of those films, so catch it while you can.

SOURCE: By Catriona Gilmour Hamilton