Sasha nearly missed Stories We Tell because she was feeling under the weather. Resolving to soldier on, tap into energizing mountain air and make the extra effort on the last day it screened, she says in her capsule review, “of course it turned out to be one of those films that changes how you see the world.”
Tom Hall at Hammer to Nail has written a full-fledged review from TIFF but it’s hard for me to pull a proper excerpt because I think this is one of those movies I want to know next to nothing about when the lights go down.
What is so thrilling about Stories We Tell is not that the film ineffably expresses its themes, but rather how it directly confronts them, constantly calling into question the adequacy of what the film is setting out to do and drawing in different opinions about what might be accomplished by telling Diane and the family’s story. This constant questioning of its own premise and presumptions gives Stories We Tell a real power, forcing viewers to not only examine the film’s storytelling devices and strategies, but ultimately, their own position in their own lives, their own secrets and those of the people they love, the memories that they can no longer fully call to mind, the way in which their own lives are re-created in the stories they tell themselves.