Sarah Polley

The trauma of the child prodigy

Sarah Polley was eight years old when she nearly died on Terry Gilliam's set. It happened in 1988 during the shoot of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, when the director forced her to run between real explosions that left her deaf in one ear for weeks. That was not just a set anecdote but the start of a lasting distrust of the film industry's hierarchies.

That fear turned into very early political activism. At twelve she was wearing protest buttons at awards galas, and by twenty she was one of the most visible figures on Canada's left. But film was still there.

In 1997, she worked with Atom Egoyan on The Sweet Hereafter. The film did well at European festivals, and the American industry tried to absorb it right away. She was offered the role of Penny Lane in Almost Famous, but she said no.

She preferred to return to Toronto.

Her connection to Spain began in 2003 through Isabel Coixet. In My Life Without Me, she played a woman who plans her own death with a coolness that stunned critics. The Catalan director worked with her again in 2005 for The Secret Life of Words, because Polley handled silence better than any actress of her generation.

The Camera as a Shield

In 2006, she decided she no longer wanted others telling her where to stand. She wrote and directed Away from Her, based on a short story by Alice Munro. The film cost less than five million dollars and earned Julie Christie an Oscar nomination.

And the gamble paid off.

But her big breakthrough came in 2012 with Stories We Tell. It is a documentary in which she dissects her own family and discovers that her biological father is not the man who raised her. The film uses fake footage shot on Super-8 to deceive the viewer and question the reliability of family memories.

That same year she published a series of essays explaining why she had decided to leave acting for good. Polley did not want to be the object of anyone's gaze. She wanted to be the one looking. So she focused on writing and raising her children while dealing with the aftereffects of a serious concussion that kept her in the dark for months.

El silencio de los graneros

In 2022, she returned to directing with Women Talking. The production was a logistical challenge because the script adapted a novel by Miriam Toews about systematic abuse in a Mennonite colony. The shoot followed a strict mental health protocol to shield the actresses from the emotional weight of the material.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2023.

Polley took the stage and joked that the Academy hadn't been scared off by a film that ended with the word “democracy.” But behind the spotlights, reality was different. In her memoir, published that same year under the title Run Towards the Danger, she detailed the abuse she had endured for decades in the Canadian film industry.

For her, filmmaking has always been a tool for personal healing. She has no interest in fame or exclusive deals with streaming platforms. In fact, she turned down several offers to direct superhero blockbusters because she preferred to keep full control over the final cut of her work.

In 2024, she began pre-production on a new, realistic take on Bambi for Disney. The film uses motion-capture technology, and its estimated budget exceeds $100 million.