The Tale

Director: Jennifer Fox
Screenwriters: Jennifer Fox

Institute History

Description

Jennifer, a globetrotting journalist and professor, lives an enviable life with her boyfriend in New York City. That is, until her mother finds a story Jennifer wrote at age 13 depicting a “special” relationship with two adult coaches. Reading the yellowed pages of "The Tale," Jennifer discovers the coded details she composed 40 years earlier are quite unlike her recollection. Deeply shaken yet determined to square her version of events with the truth, Jennifer sets out to find her two coaches. Returning to the Carolina horse farm where so much transpired, Jennifer's gangly yet tenacious seventh-grade self reawakens, and the loving stories she told herself for decades begin to unravel.

Seamlessly toggling between past and present, writer/director Jennifer Fox forges a fresh and uncompromising cinematic language to penetrate the heightened internal worlds of her character at two pivotal stages. Shocking, emotionally raw, and destabilizing, this investigative thriller punctures the insidious workings of unchecked power and lays bare the mechanisms of memory—refashioned over time by a growing girl in order to not only ?survive, but to prevail.


— C.L.

Screening Details

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