Sarah Polley

Sarah Polley is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, director, and actor. She began her acting career as a child, starring in many productions for film and television. After making short films, Polley made her feature-length directorial debut with the drama film Away from Her in 2006. She received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, which she adapted from the Alice Munro story The Bear Came Over the Mountain. Her other projects include the documentary film Stories We Tell (2012), which won the New York Film Critics Circle prize and the National Board of Review award for best documentary; the miniseries adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (2017); and the romantic comedy Take This Waltz (2011).

Twitter: @realsarahpolley
Instagram: @realsarahpolley

Together the essays prove that there’s nothing more potentially dangerous, or more thrilling, than a woman who dares to seek and tell the truth.” –The Globe and Mail

FESTIVAL BOOK

Run Towards the Danger

In this extraordinary book, Sarah Polley explores what it is to live in one’s body, in a constant state of becoming, learning and changing.

Polley’s work as an actor, screenwriter and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity and deep humanity. She brings all of those qualities, along with her exquisite storytelling chops, to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley’s life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of examining the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a “reciprocal pressure dance.”

Polley contemplates stories from her own life ranging from stage fright to high-risk childbirth to endangerment and more. After struggling with the aftermath of a concussion, Polley met a specialist who gave her wholly new advice: to recover from a traumatic injury, she had to retrain her mind to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered her symptoms. With riveting clarity, she shows the power of applying that same advice to other areas of her life in order to find a path forward, a way through. Rather than live in a protective crouch she had to run towards the danger.

GET THE BOOK

Owl’s Nest Books (Calgary) | Calgary Public Library

BE CURIOUSER

How Sarah Polley, Childhood Star and ‘Canada’s Sweetheart,’ Grew Up Way Too Fast. –The New York Times
The Stories Sarah Polley Couldn’t Tell. –The New Yorker