Staff Picks: Movies  Staff-recommended viewing from the KPL
catalog.  Stories We Tell  One’s take away from writer/director
Sarah Polley’s brilliant, semi-autobiographical Stories We Tell
may be that the film is about family dynamics and the complex
secrets they often keep hidden. But what the film is really
about is the way in which our lives are like stories, often
interpreted and consumed differently by various actors involved
within the circle of a particular narrative. The 'truth' about
Sarah's origins becomes increasingly unstable as memories (some
of which may be unreliable) of the past highlight
the relativistic and nuanced nature of individual perspectives
and experiences. Everyone's take on Sarah's mother is bit
different, which is to say, she struggled to conform to any
singular mold or characterization.  The film works very much
like Tim O’brien’s masterful fictional memoir The Things They
Carried, a novel set in the Vietnam War but a book concerned
primarily with the importance of storytelling as