Durban - The Tale, starring Laura Dern, will have its South African premiere at this year’s Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) on Saturday, and chronicles one woman’s powerful investigation into her own childhood memories.
This is 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.
Fox will be at the DIFF to present her film, and at the Durban FilmMart, where she will participate 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 story starts with accomplished documentarian, Jennifer (played by Dern) working in New York, where she 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, 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 grows, 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 events.
The Tale is the first narrative feature from Fox and has been described as “an unforgettable meditation on the elusive nature of memory”.
Fox’s documentary films have earned international acclaim for their groundbreaking artistry and unflinching honesty. Based on Fox’s own life story, The Tale sees the film-maker 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 Fox.
“It was, ‘How and why did it happen, and how and why did I spin it as a positive story?’ There was a light bulb 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,” she said.
Fox will be in Durban from July 19-23 and The Tale will be screened on July 21 at 2.15pm at Suncoast CineCentre and on July 23 at 4pm at Musgrave Ster-Kinekor.