“Stories We Tell” is a meta-movie: it is as much about the
process of making a movie about unearthing family secrets as it is about the family
(a Jewish family straddling both Toronto and Montreal) itself.
Sarah Polley sometimes uses actors for the characters, and
sometimes intermixes the “stories” with suoer-8 footage from the family members
themselves. The process of setting up
the interviews, in a Toronto condo, is shown with some technical detail. I will have to consider similar efforts when
I make my own DADT video soon.
The film offers non-stop chatter, as the stories go from one
member to the next, much of it about a matriarch who has passed away, and who
may or may not have had affairs that resulted in children not being completely
sure of their fathers.
I could imagine such a film being contemplated about my late
mother’s side of the family, There is
her own story, as to how she came to Washington in 1934 (born on an Ohio farm
in 1913 and surviving appendicitis during the WWI years) and met my father
while working for and living in the Y (as was he), in days when single people
didn’t have their own apartments. The
lineage dies with me, but would culminate in a bizarre or ironic set of events
connected to the end of “don’t ask don’t tell”.
How many people know this story of my family? Some, including a few in Hollywood (at least
they’ve read it online). But one could
imagine a film like this about my Mother’s last years, and about my approach to
eldercare, and about the different ways people perceived my actions. It gets into from very sensitive matters that
I won’t detail here, but I can imagine what Polley could do with it.
I saw this before a small crowd late night at the AMC
Shirlington in Arlington VA (still in the largest auditorium). Some of the
audience seemed quite engaged in the details of the story, as if an English
teacher could give a video quiz on them!
The film, from Roadside Attractions (and Lionsgate?) has
link here. The original production company is the
National Film Board of Canada. I wonder if my movie would be a good "roadside attraction". The little company has embellished its trademark trailer with more music.
I walked out of the theater “in the moonlight”. Never saw so
much detail on our nearest astronomical neighbor with the naked eye as last
night.
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