The National Film Board of Canada was my entree into documentary. Their logo before a movie made an educational film an entertaining and engaging experience rather than the dull and dusty equivalents from Australia or the UK. Decades later they are still funding exciting documentaries

A sensation at this year’s Sydney Film Festival and now deservedly in general release, Sarah Polley’s STORIES WE TELL (M) consolidates her ascendancy as one of contemporary cinema’s superior practitioners.

The film begins with a quote from Margaret Atwood’s ALIAS GRACE:-

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are ‘retelling it’, to yourself or to someone else.”

STORIES WE TELL is an inspired, genre-twisting film that playfully excavates layers of myth and memory to find the elusive truth at the core of a family of storytellers.

Sarah’s mother, Diane, was an actress married to her father Michael, also a thespian and a procrastinating writer. When Diane becomes pregnant with Sarah after being on tour with a show, true paternity became a running family joke. After Diane dies, Sarah seeks to establish whether there was any foundation to the scuttlebutt and embarks on an enthralling journey that is sensational in its secrets and surprises. Ironically, one of the persons of interest in Polley’s true paternity is Harry Gulkin, the producer of the Canadian classic LIES MY FATHER TOLD ME.

A story within stories, a film within a film, (the audience is gifted a fly on the wall vantage to the process of the film’s production in some scenes) this is damnably and compulsively watchable cinema.