SARAH POLLEY

It had been a decade since Sarah Polley directed her last film, Stories We Tell (2012). Based on a Miriam Toews novel, her fourth feature, Women Talking (2022), came out to critical acclaim. The film, adapted and directed by Polley, won her an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

“The last line of our film is delivered by a young woman to a new baby, and she says, ‘Your story will be different from ours.’ It’s a promise, a commitment and an anchor,” she said in her acceptance speech.

Born in Toronto, Polley is a former child actor who made her film debut in the Disney movie One Magic Christmas (1985) at the age of five. Her star continued to rise in TV series and films including Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997), which received the Grand Prix at Cannes.

She went on to write and direct Take This Waltz (2011), inspired by a Leonard Cohen song of the same name, and Stories We Tell, a feature-length documentary about her family, which won several awards for best documentary and was named one of the Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time in 2015. Polley continued to write, releasing her first book of essays, Run Towards the Danger, in 2022.

Polley told The New Yorker in 2011 that her early success as a child performer allowed her to set professional boundaries at a young age. A sentiment she reiterated at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. “I am not overly ambitious as a filmmaker, generally,” Polley reportedly told the audience. “If I don’t make another film again, I’m OK with that. I don’t want to make a film unless it has something to say.”