Stories We Tell

Stories We Tell (2012) is a Canadian documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Sarah Polley, who turns the camera on her own family to reconstruct her late mother's life — and finds that no two people remember the same woman.

Polley gathers siblings, her father Michael, old friends and former colleagues, and sets them talking. Each account is confident. Several of them contradict each other directly. Buried inside the interviews is a secret that had been kept for decades, and the film's structure lets the secret emerge the way such things actually do — gradually, with competing versions competing for space. Polley weaves in Super 8-style archive footage and staged reconstructions that blur the line between memory and record, which turns out to be the film's central argument rather than just a stylistic choice.

What makes it unusual in the documentary landscape is that Polley is an implicated party, not a neutral investigator. She's asking questions about herself. That position — reporter and subject in the same body — gives the film an honesty that's hard to manufacture. Stream Stories We Tell (2012) online on iFILM.