“STORIES WE TELL” 2012 | 1h49’ [CA] | WHO ARE WE? WHO WERE WE? Cinema Screenings
Details
#### Conversas com Cinema© PROSA
## Ciclo QUEM SOMOS? QUEM FOMOS? (QUANDO CONTAMOS HISTÓRIAS)
[WHO ARE WE? WHO WERE WE? (WHEN WE COUNT STORIES) Cinema Screenings]
Curadoria de Alexandre Braga
“STORIES WE TELL” 2012 | 1h49’ [CA] (Histórias que Contamos - PT)
De Sarah Polley
Sábado Dia 11/07 às 19h30 [Saturday 07/11 at 7:30pm]
A realizadora Sarah Polley investiga um segredo familiar através de entrevistas, arquivos e reconstruções cinematográficas. O filme revela como a memória e a narrativa moldam a verdade.
Director Sarah Polley investigates a family secret through interviews, archives, and cinematic reconstructions. The film reveals how memory and storytelling shape truth.
Spoken in English | Subtitled in Portuguese
Mais info e reservas:
More info and reservations:
https://prosacultural.org/cinema/quemsomosquemfomos
There is a question that accompanies every human life: who are we? Yet perhaps there is another, even more fundamental: who were we before becoming who we are today?
We live surrounded by stories. We tell them to others, we tell versions of ourselves, and we inherit narratives that began long before we were born. Memory is never a simple archive of events; it is a living landscape where remembrance, imagination, silence and forgetting coexist. It is through stories that we make sense of the past and attempt to understand the present.
Documentary cinema occupies a unique place within this process. Some filmmakers have understood that filming a life is not merely about preserving facts or testimonies, but about performing a profoundly ethical act: offering time, attention and dignity to another person's experience. When someone is truly listened to, something remarkable happens: their existence is no longer simply lived—it also becomes understood.
Perhaps this is why some stories need to be told before a life can move forward. Family secrets, unspoken episodes, interrupted choices or seemingly insignificant moments can remain hidden for decades, quietly shaping who we become. Telling these stories does not change the past, but it can transform our relationship with it. Many people only begin to move beyond certain inner impasses once they discover a narrative capable of giving form and meaning to what had long remained fragmented or concealed.
It is precisely this transformative power of storytelling that brings together the two films in this programme.
In Man on Wire (2008), James Marsh begins with an event that could easily have survived merely as an extraordinary historical anecdote: Philippe Petit's clandestine tightrope walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Yet the film quickly reveals that it is never truly about the feat itself. Through interviews, photographs, archival footage and carefully crafted reconstructions, Marsh transforms this impossible crossing into a meditation on imagination, friendship, perseverance and the profoundly human desire to undertake acts that appear to serve no practical purpose—except reminding us that freedom can also take the form of beauty. The documentary preserves an ephemeral moment and restores to it an almost mythical dimension, showing how certain events endure because they continue to give meaning to the lives of those who witnessed them.
If Man on Wire asks how an extraordinary event becomes collective memory, Stories We Tell (2012) turns inward, exploring the very nature of truth within a family. Here, Sarah Polley undertakes one of the most courageous gestures in contemporary documentary cinema by transforming the investigation of her own family history into a public act of vulnerability. She brings together siblings, her father, friends and people who knew her late mother, confronting conflicting memories without attempting to resolve them into a single definitive version. In doing so, she reveals—with extraordinary honesty—that no memory ever belongs entirely to one person alone. The film becomes even more compelling as it constantly exposes its own documentary mechanisms, blending archival footage with meticulously staged reconstructions and inviting the viewer to question what they believe to be authentic. Polley's courage lies not only in revealing a deeply personal family secret, but in accepting that loving someone also means acknowledging that we can never fully possess the truth of their story—or of our own.
Between Philippe Petit's seemingly impossible walk and Sarah Polley's delicate excavation of family memory lies a shared conviction: every life deserves to be told. Not because every life is extraordinary, but because every human existence embodies a unique way of inhabiting the world.
For perhaps listening deeply to another person's story remains one of humanity's oldest forms of care. And because, sometimes, it is through the lives of others that we finally discover the words we needed to understand our own.
(Curatorship by Alexandre Braga)
All Cinema PROSA films will be shown on an illuminated pixel (65’’ QLED screen) in a room with a maximum capacity of 24 spectators.
Come and have a glass of wine or a non-alcoholic drink in the cinema room with us!