Stories We Tell
A family mystery that turns the manufacture of memory into its true subject.
THE STORYTELLING PROBLEM
How can a filmmaker investigate family truth while acknowledging that memory and authorship distort it?
THE STRUCTURAL SOLUTION
Expose the machinery of storytelling and use fabricated home movies to destabilize the authority of images.
STRUCTURAL MAP
Build Diane Polley as a vivid center through many loving accounts
Allow inconsistencies to suggest a concealed family history
Pursue paternity through competing narrators and documentary process
Resolve the biological question while expanding the authorship problem
Expose apparent home movies as constructed images
End with ownership of the story permanently unsettled
INFORMATION-RELEASE STRATEGY
The film initially allows archive and testimony to behave conventionally before revealing that some of its most persuasive images were fabricated.
Solving paternity does not conclude the story; it transfers the question from what happened to who has the right to shape what happened.
The filmmaker's own construction becomes evidence rather than a hidden mechanism.
CHARACTER SYSTEM
Investigator whose authority becomes one of the film's questions
Absent center built differently by every person who loved her
Competing authors whose emotional claims resist simple hierarchy
A polyphonic memory system that prevents definitive ownership
EVIDENCE SYSTEM
Contradictory affection and perspective
Material connection to an absent woman
A test of the audience's trust in photographic evidence
The father's authored version visibly directed by his daughter
METHODS IN THE FIELD
Expose the act of construction
Transparency about construction can deepen rather than weaken emotional truth.
Complicate the filmmaker's authority
Family stories belong to multiple narrators at once.
Make memory polyphonic
Transparency about construction can deepen rather than weaken emotional truth.
Reveal fabrication strategically
Family stories belong to multiple narrators at once.
WHAT AN EDITOR CAN STEAL
01Transparency about construction can deepen rather than weaken emotional truth.
02Family stories belong to multiple narrators at once.
APPLY IT TO YOUR FILM
- Whose version currently controls your family story?
- Could revealing construction deepen rather than damage trust?
- What question remains after the factual mystery is solved?
- Are different narrators allowed genuinely incompatible ownership?
- Does your evidence look more certain than it really is?