In 2006, Canadian actress turned filmmaker Sarah Polley shaped a short story by Alice Munro into the touching, Oscar nominated Away From Her. It was a significant achievement not only for the tender way she approached the material (an older man is emotionally abandoned by his wife when she succumbs to Alzheimer's), but that a mere 27 year old could give the story such depth and resonance.

It became her stock in trade as she turned the camera on her own family in a warts-n-all documentary about their mother, a glittering figure who died when Polley was young. “What I overheard was Mom saying that she was pregnant - and that she wasn't sure who the father was.” Raising skeletons from the dead is never easy on those who then have to live with them, harder still when the collective memory defies individual accounts. Add the whisper of adultery and its aftershocks and you get a fascinating work that, in the cold, hard light of day, challenges the way we tell stories to keep each other warm.

Embracing the current fashion for starring in nonfiction, boots and all, Polley is far from a passionless observer. Here she's director / producer / writer / interviewer / subject and conduit whose Super-8 recreations of the past mix freely with actuality to the point that it becomes hard to tell where one ends and another begins. Which is rather her point. “I'm interested in the way we tell stories about our lives,” she said. “About the fact that the truth is often ephemeral and difficult to pin down.” She slowly teases out a version of their family history then turns this understanding upside down in an act that would devastate most people. “How ironic it is that the final revelation and its aftermath has brought Sarah and I closer together,” said the man she knew as her father.

Stories We Tell is a deeply moving experience which challenges not only the way we look at the past, but the way we collectively agree to understand events. Audaciously, Polley elects to democratise that understanding and legitimise each differing view. This version of history was not written by the winner and somewhere in the fragmented layers of Polley's visually sublime film is a heart-wrenching act of therapy. One that also brought a man back from the brink of extinction in the most beautiful way imaginable. That alone distinguishes Stories We Tell in the cannon of family documentaries. Unmissable.

// COLIN FRASER

Previewed at the State Theatre, Sydney, on 14 June 2013