The Tale

Prompted by her mother's discovery of an essay she wrote at thirteen, a documentary maker named Jennifer returns to the summer she spent with a riding instructor and a running coach. What she had long remembered as a first romance she is forced to re-examine, and the film restages her memories, revising them as her adult understanding of what happened breaks through the story she had told herself.

Explicitly built around screen memory, the film shows how trauma is narrated, protected, and revised over a lifetime, and how the mind can recast abuse as something chosen. For a therapist it is an unusually direct depiction of memory, denial, and belated recognition. It was selected for the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018.