ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how women needed to have at times become difficult not to say nasty in order to gain their agency and at times simply their voice. The MeToo movement clearly created an important and lasting rupture in the way women in creative industries and elsewhere and rewatching Stories We Tell in the context of Sarah Polley’s autobiography Run Towards the Danger has established clearly how her own life bumped into various patriarchal abuses over and over again. Stories We Tell addresses notions of lack, loss, mourning and melancholia in a direct and material way: the mother of the filmmaker is dead, and the film is a way of dealing with that loss—but it is also a search for some kind of truth and perhaps reconciliation. In Stories We Tell, the performance by the filmmaker, and, by extension, the performativeness of the piece of work as a whole, is thus an artefact that escapes easy assumptions and categorizations.
