Stories We Tell is Sarah Polley’s third feature and seventh film. Lee has noted a distinct direction in her work. “Her signature is to look at relationships deeply and honestly in a microscopic way, and the emotional waves these relationships have on the people around them. A deep exploration of intimate relationships at different stages was at the core of I Shout Love, Away from Her and Take This Waltz, and now Stories We Tell takes this territory to a new level.”

Stories We Tell combines Polley’s fascination with relationships and her desire to experiment with storytelling in the hopes of revealing the many truths that exist simultaneously. “Since I was about 19 or 20, I’ve been thinking about these things, which is why every short film I’ve ever made, as well as Away from Her and Take This Waltz, are about long-term relationships,” she said. “But if I have learned anything from making this film, it is that we can’t all be right and we can’t all be wrong. So we must be unintentionally distorting things to varying degrees in order to feed our own version of what we need the past and history to be, and in our way, we must all be telling the truth as well.”