Memory is a faulty thing. We experience events on an emotional level instead of a rational level. Therefore, how we interpret events is coded by how we feel about those events. In any given situation, each participant will have their own unique means of remembering and interpreting the events in question. This is especially true in regard to events that shape the trajectory of a family.
The documentary film Stories We Tell looks into one family and one specific story. Canadian actress and director Sarah Polley turns her camera on her own family and explores her mother, Diane, through the lenses of her father, siblings, and family friends.
Sarah’s exploration of her mother centers on two events: her mother’s time working on a play in Montréal during which Sarah was conceived and her mother’s early death of cancer when Sarah was eleven. Her father, Michael Polley, narrates the film using pieces of his memoirs to bookend the story.
As the story of her mother progresses, Sarah learns from her family and her mother’s friends that it is very possible her mother had an affair while she was in Montréal. This possible affair was the root of a joke in the Polley family that arose after Dianne’s death that Michael was not Sarah’s biological father and to guess who Sarah’s “biological father” really is. Through exploring her mother, Sarah learns the answer to this question.
But for Polley, even as important as this information might be, what she is most interested in as a director is how everyone has her or his own perspectives on her mother, the possible affair, and her mother’s life. Polley is interested in the perspectives themselves. This is a film about memory and trying to better understand and capture someone lost by piecing together the memories of others.
As a woman who also lost her mother at an early age, I found Polley’s search to mirror my own. When I was a 19 year-old college sophomore, my mother was in a horrific car accident. The accident took the strong, creative, intelligent woman I was raised by and replaced her with an emotionally raw, broken yet beautiful woman who both is my mother and isn’t at all.
I find that the older I get, the more I wonder about the woman I was just beginning to know at 19. Who was she and how did she respond to the shifting winds of her life as they changed. What did living on her own and creating look like for her? How did she know when she met her future husband, my father, that he was the man she should bind her life to for the extent of it? I am sure this reality she now lives in was not even on her mind when she said yes to his request of marriage.
Like Sarah, like myself, and like so many others who have lost a parent in all the various ways one can lose a parent, story is the space where we can encounter them. Lost wisdom in found in the stories about these people who were meant to be here longer, guiding and encouraging us as we mature through life. In others’ stories about them, we gain a more complete image of them. Polley’s film, Stories We Tell, demonstrates the power of story to reveal those things which might otherwise remain hidden by loss.