“The pages that follow recount the most dangerous episodes of my life: those that I kept quiet, that I tried to escape or that kept me from sleeping for countless nights. »
In Run towards dangerCanadian director and actress Sarah Polley, winner of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Women Talking (2022), confronts the great traumas of her life as an artist, woman and mother. At the initiative of a doctor who recommends that, to heal the lasting after-effects of a concussion, she fight against her survival instincts to practice the activities that trigger her symptoms, she dives back in and dissects, with clairvoyance and aplomb, the construction of one’s memories and personal history, as well as gaps in memory.
“I am perfectly aware that my childhood still marks my life,” writes Sarah Polley. Until recently, however, I did not know that my adult experience could modify my relationship with the past. […] I came to understand that yesterday and today are always interacting, like dance partners united by mutual tension. »
In a series of six powerful essays, the artist, long associated with her role as Sara Stanley in the series Tales of Avonleawhich earned him the nickname “Canada’s darling”, deconstructs, with his current perspective, the physical, psychological and discursive reactions that resulted from the most terrifying events of his life.
In “Alice’s Collapse”, she matches the story ofAlice in Wonderland to that of the 15-year-old teenager that she was who, during her first experience at the theater, was overcome by unhealthy stage fright, in addition to being burdened by scoliosis which caused her intolerable back pain. In “The One Who Silenced”, she returns to her choice to remain silent when women began to denounce her attacker, Jian Gomeshi. Further, she recounts the grueling and dangerous shooting of the film The adventures of Baron Münchausen (1988), by Terry Gilliam, then her near-fatal birth and the bliss that followed it.
As in his brilliant documentary Stories We Tell (2012), in which she probes the mystery of her origins by bringing together the testimonies of her family, the mechanics of memory and the transformations of her interpretations and perceptions, Sarah Polley demonstrates the porosity and defectiveness of the truth, and dissects the instincts and contradictions that pave the way to survival.
Reluctant to point fingers or pronounce guilty verdicts, the author instead embraces the paradoxes that have marked her journey and lets the evolution of the world and society resonate with her own awareness and her own maturation. From this personal story arise questions that enter into conversation with the experience of anyone who dives into its pages. A brilliant exercise in introspection.