Storytelling

Storytelling (2001) is an American dark comedy and drama you can watch online on iFILM, written and directed by Todd Solondz. The film splits into two halves — "Fiction" and "Non-Fiction" — each tracking a different person who believes they're making art while actually using other people as raw material. Selma Blair plays a creative-writing student who, after a bruising encounter with a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor, concludes that exploitation might be the path to literary relevance.

The second half follows Paul Giamatti as a documentary filmmaker convinced he's capturing something meaningful about American teenagers. He isn't. John Goodman and Julie Hagerty play the parents of his subject, and the film watches them slowly understand that the camera's version of their family is a different document entirely from the one they'd tell. Mark Webber plays the teenage boy at the centre — oblivious, ambitious, and filmed with a precision that crosses into cruelty.

Solondz doesn't let anyone off the hook — not the characters, not the audience either. It's a precise and uncomfortable film about the gap between a storyteller's intent and what telling does to the people inside the story. Stream Storytelling (2001) online on iFILM.