(Laura
Dern & Isabelle
Nélisse)
The
Tale, starring Laura Dern will have its South African
Premiere at this year’s Durban International Film Festival on July 21 at 14h15
at Suncoast CineCentre followed by a screening on July 23 at 16h00 at Musgrave
Ster Kinekor. The director Jennifer Fox will be in attendance at the DIFF to
present her film, and at the Durban FilmMart where she will be participating in
a panel session entitled The Medium is
the Message, where she will discuss the transition from documentary
film-making to narrative film-making.
The
Tale chronicles one woman’s powerful investigation
into her own childhood memories, as she is forced to re-examine her first
sexual experience – and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. The
film is written and directed by Sundance Grand Prize winner and Emmy® nominee
Jennifer Fox, who based it on her own true story.
Starring Laura Dern (Oscar® nominee for Wild and Rambling Rose; Emmy® winner for HBO’s Big Little Lies; Emmy® nominee for HBO’s Enlightened, Recount and Afterburn), together with Isabelle
Nélisse (Mama), Elizabeth Debicki (The Night Manager), Jason Ritter (Kevin (Probably) Saves the World),
Frances Conroy (Emmy® nominee for HBO’s Six
Feet Under) and John Heard (Emmy® nominee for HBO’s The Sopranos), with Common (Oscar® winner for Selma) and Ellen Burstyn (Academy Award® winner for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore).
An accomplished documentarian working in
New York, Jennifer (Laura Dern) is completing her latest project about the
lives of women around the world. She receives a series of phone calls from her
mother, Nettie (Ellen Burstyn), who has found a short story Jennifer wrote at
age 13, in which she describes various encounters with her riding instructor,
Mrs G (Elizabeth Debicki), and her running coach, Bill (Jason Ritter), while at
summer camp. Nettie is unnerved by the implications of her daughter’s writing,
but Jennifer is nonplussed. She has always looked back with fondness on the
time she spent with these two charismatic adults.
Egged on by Nettie and encouraged by her
supportive fiancé (Common), Jennifer yearns to know more and sets out on a
journey, 30 years later, to find those people from her past – the children, now
adults, who also attended the camp back then – and eventually the coaches
themselves. But the more she learns, the more her memories shift and the more
questions she unearths. As Jennifer’s frustration mounts, she finds herself
turning inward to get to the truth, imagining conversations with her
13-year-old self (Isabelle Nélisse) and even Mrs G and Bill in an effort to
understand how and why events occurred so long ago.
An unforgettable meditation on the elusive
nature of memory, The Tale is the
first narrative feature from Jennifer Fox, whose documentary films have earned
international acclaim for their groundbreaking artistry and unflinching
honesty. Based on Fox’s own life story, The
Tale sees the filmmaker bravely pushing forward the boundaries of
conventional storytelling, creating a dialogue between past and present to
illustrate the interplay between memory and trauma.
“My goal was not to ask, 'Did this
happen?,' because I always remembered it," explains writer and director
Fox. "It was, 'How and why did it happen, and how and why did I spin it as
a positive story?' There was a lightbulb moment when I was making another film
about women all around the world, and it seemed that every other woman –
regardless of class, culture or colour – had an abuse story to tell. Their
stories just floored me, because they had a system or a paradigm that looked
like my story. Suddenly, I couldn’t see it as my own private little narrative
and knew that it was time to investigate what happened in the open space of a
fictional film.”
The
Tale is produced by Jennifer Fox, Oren Moverman,
Laura Rister, Mynette Louie, Simone Pero, Lawrence Inglee, Sol Bondy, Regina K.
Scully, Lynda Weinman and Reka Posta. Julie Parker Benello, Dan Cogan, Geralyn
Dreyfous, Wendy Ettinger, Abigail E. Disney, Robert & Penny Fox, Jayme
Lemons, Amy Rodrigue, Ali Jazayeri, Jason Van Eman, David Van Eman, Ross
Marroso and Ben McConley are executive producers.
The
Tale will be on MNET in South Africa in August this
year.
The Full programme for DIFF can be
downloaded at https://durbanfilmfest.co.za/images/DIFF2018/diff-2018-programme.pdf
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