The older I get, the more I understand how tragic life can be, how little it takes to shift from one road to the next and how irrelevant it is to judge others on their blundering path through life. We all blunder at some point. I just finished watching Stories We Tell, a documentary about a girl, the director, who is in search of understanding her deceased mother and her living father, and her newly realized biological father, a result of an affair with a man who 30 years later still loved her to the depths of his core. You can tell. The story slowly unwinds through the articulate interviews with brothers and sisters and also, the written story as spoken by her father. This movie has a lot to say about love, life, and the search for truth of relationship or existence.
Much of the film is composed of interviews and vintage home movie footage, but some of the scenes are reinacted, with actors, which comes as a disappointment to me and what I thought was the directors search for truth. They seem misplaced in their attempts to recreate reality, going a step further than the spoken “truths” of those vocalizing their memories of the mother and the events that transpired. There is a scene in the film that is one of the more beautiful moments I’ve ever seen in a film though, and it’s really pure perfection of story, edit and sound track working in perfect harmony creating something that speaks so much louder than any one of it’s parts could ever reach.
It’s worth watching the film just for that minute..but if you don’t..it’s this song below, Demon Host by Timber Timbre, playing and one by one each person who has been in the film up to this point is shown sitting in silence/thought with their faces bearing the weight of their memories. If ever there is truth, it is in that moment, on each of their faces.
The film is definitely worth a watch. You can get to it here. Stories We Tell.
