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Saturday, December 1, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW: Sarah Polley will be telling her Stories We Tell at Sundance 2013





Sarah Polley will be telling her Stories We Tell at Sundance 2013.
The Toronto actor/director’s confessional and highly personal documentary, a surprise hit at TIFF and other festivals this fall, has been invited to screen in the prestigious Spotlight program of Robert Redford’s annual fest in Park City, Utah, Jan. 17 to 27.








Spotlight is a non-competitive Sundance program billed as “a tribute to the cinema we love.” Polley’s is the only Canadian film announced for the section.
Two other Canadian films have been confirmed for Sundance, as the festival rolls out its announcements.
In the Park City at Midnight program, similar to TIFF’s Midnight Madness, the found-footage horror sequel S-VHS will premiere. It’s a multi-director film and mostly American, but Halifax’s Jason Eisener (Hobo With a Shotgun) contributes one of the film’s parts.
And in the New Frontier program of multimedia installations and other experimental projects, Quebecer François Delisle’s The Meteor has secured a berth. He describes his film, about an adult son and mother “linked by crime, guilt and loneliness,” as having “a connection to life.” He says five Polaroid pictures he received gave him the idea for it.

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Sarah Polley, star of Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, Doug Liman's Go, and Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, wrote and directed Away From Her, which nabbed Oscar noms for her screenplay and Julie Christie's performance. But Polley's biggest achievement yet is her polyphonic portrait of her own fractured family in Stories We Tell, which earned a rapturous reception at Telluride, where it played this weekend (after its Venice fest world premiere and before it heads on to Toronto, which is also billed as a North American premiere).
STORY: 'Stories We Tell' Director Sarah Polley Born After Mother's Affair 
"It's 20 times harder to make a documentary than a fiction film," Polley told The Hollywood Reporter as people lined up down Colorado Avenue and around the corner to see her doc debut.
It's a startlingly frank film, a bursting pinata of colorful family secrets. The star is not Polley, who does appear onscreen, but her late mother Diane, a larger-than-life Canadian actress glimpsed in an incredible wealth of home movie footage. The propulsive force of the film is Polley's quest to sleuth out and track down her biological father, and to demonstrate cinematically the way that her mother's passionately unstable actions played out in the fates of her sprawling family. The film does not sprawl. In five painstaking years of production, Polley and editor Michael Munn crafted years of interviews, archival material, and artful re-enactions of reality into a precise mystery story that ramifies as logically as frost tendrils on a Toronto winter windowpane. It's a lark as well as a deep emotional plunge, and the surprise last scene packs a delightful punch.
VENICE REVIEW: Stories We Tell
The stories the family tells, often directed by Polley on camera, kept viewers on the edge of their seats. Considering Polley's Hollywood pedigree, she's likely to figure in the documentary Oscar competition.

 

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