Polley’s directing debut to get Academy Award push Away from Her, the film-festival hit by the Canadian actress, has garnered critical acclaim, foreign sales and now even early Oscar buzz for Julie Christie

by LEAH McLAREN, Globe & Mail

‘I’m devastated,” said Daniel Iron. “We were hoping for so much more.”The veteran Canadian producer is obviously joking. In fact, there’s been little to lament about critical response to his latest project, Sarah Polley’s movie Away From Her, which (in case you’ve been living under a rock) recently had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

In addition to a distribution bidding war, lengthy list of foreign sales and near-unanimous critical acclaim, the film is now garnering advance Oscar buzz for Julie Christie’s star turn as a woman coping with Alzheimer’s disease.

“Lions Gate is going to do [an Oscar-nomination] campaign for 2007,” Iron confirmed.

Not since Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (in which Polley, fittingly, starred) has there been such immediate domestic and international buzz about a homegrown title.

Read the rest of the article here.

LIONSGATE GETS AWAY FROM HERFilm Stars Academy Award® Nominee Julie Christie, Academy Award® Winner Olympia Dukakis and Gordon Pinsent

Acclaimed Feature Directorial Debut of Actress Sarah Polley Acquired Following Gala World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival

SANTA MONICA, CA (September 13, 2006) – Lionsgate (NYSE: LGF), the leading independent filmed entertainment studio, has acquired U.S. distribution rights to Sarah Polley’s critically acclaimed and audience pleasing drama AWAY FROM HER, it was jointly announced today by Lionsgate’s President of Acquisitions and Co-Productions Peter Block and President of Theatrical Films Tom Ortenberg. The studio plans a Spring 2007 release.

Said Ortenberg, “It is an honor to be working with Sarah on her wonderfully accomplished feature writing and directing debut. AWAY FROM HER is a great, universal love story which we feel will be an early awards contender in multiple categories for next year. We are looking forward to working with Simone Urdl and Jennifer Weiss while also reuniting with producer Danny Iron, with whom we worked on THE RED VIOLIN.”

Said Polley, “We were blown away by Lionsgate’s enthusiasm for the film, and are completely thrilled by the prospect of working with them.”

Read more about it here.

I’ve just added new photos from Sarah’s third TIFF portrait session.

I’ve just added new photos from the press conference and premiere of “Away From Her” and another portrait session.

How does an icon of the cinema wind up in a young Canadian director’s debut feature?

Friendship.

Julie Christie stars in Sarah Polley’s first feature film, Away From Her, and at a press conference yesterday before the Toronto filmfest’s Gala presentation, Christie said she’s in the movie because the two women are friends.

“I like her very much. It’s extraordinarily flattering to be asked to be in a friend’s movie, and I didn’t want to miss out on this experience in Sarah’s life.”

Christie, 65, whose career in the ’60s and ’70s included starring roles in such films as Dr. Zhivago, Petulia, Shampoo and Don’t Look Now worked with Polley in two films — No Such Thing and The Secret Life Of Words.

Polley, 27, created Away From Her from the Alice Munro short story, The Bear Came Over The Mountain. The film, which also stars Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis, Kristen Thomson, Michael Murphy and Wendy Crewson, concerns love and memory. Christie and Pinsent play a long-married couple who are dealing with her increasing memory loss. Once Christie’s character enters a home, the couple’s relationship is altered in unexpected ways.

At the press conference, Polley said about the casting of her film that, “I couldn’t get Julie’s face or Gordon’s face out of my mind once I’d read the story. It never felt right to consider anybody else.”

Based on the response to the film (we can report the widespread sobbing among audiences), Polley’s choices were perfect.

For her, being a director makes this year’s film festival, “ten times more exciting and ten times more terrifying than all the others,” said Polley. “This festival has a sort of weight to it that it’s never had for me before. I’m sort of blown away.”

About 30 years ago, Julie Christie fled exactly the sort of larger-than-life celebrity existence so many actors pursue. In the 1990s she made a return to film in such features as Afterglow, Hamlet and Finding Neverland.

Asked about the gap in her movie work, she said, “There are so many things in life you can do other than being in films.”

Indeed. Christie (like Polley) is involved in several social causes, such as animal rights and nuclear disarmament. She and Polley shared a conspiratorial laugh when a reporter asked Polley about directing a cast so much older than she is.

The young director responded, “I was moved by the story and I didn’t consider the age difference until other people mentioned it.”

Away From Her involves the sad progress of age-related memory loss and Christie is asked a question about memory in her own life. “I don’t have a very good memory,” she responded. “My mother didn’t have a very good memory. I tend not to be interested in the past. My own personal past, perhaps … but on the whole, the other things people think are important, the films, that’s gone, that’s over. I don’t waste a second thinking about that.”

Source: Canoe Network

So lovely!

Away from Her ****

Sarah Polley (Canada)

Sarah Polley is that rare flower, a genuine Canadian star. She’s well-regarded everywhere yet chooses to live and work at home. Naturally her first feature as a writer-director has garnered scrutiny. The news is all good. Working from Alice Munro’s short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain, Polley has crafted a subtle, achingly sad film that derives its impact from understatement: nuanced writing and quiet but stunning performances from Julie Christie, as a woman disappearing inside Alzheimer’s disease, and Gordon Pinsent, as the life-long husband who loves her. A lot of films at TIFF this year offer raunchy, explicit sex, but none is more shocking than what Polley shows: honest sex scenes with actors in their 60s and 70s, whose unretouched flesh becomes an emotion all by itself. J.S. (6:30 p.m., Roy Thomson Hall; also Sept. 12, 9:30 a.m., Ryerson)

Source: globeandmail.com

I’ve just added photos of Sarah at the Cocktail Party For “Away From Her” at the Chanel Celebrity Suite.

I’ve also added 5 HQ movie stills. Sarah doesn’t appear in them, but since she directed this film, I decided to post them anyway.

I’ve just added photos from the premiere of “Away From Her” and from the Canadien Film Centre BBQ that Sarah attended yesterday.

The Press Conference of “Away From Her”, Sarah’s directorial debut, took place today at the Toronto International Film Festival. What a great night for Ms Polley and her fans!
Photos can be found in the gallery:

Actor/writer/director/activist Sarah Polley shares her thoughts on working in the ‘biz.

By Adam Nayman

Predicting which titles will be hits at a major film festival is tough business (last year, Elizabethtown limped into Toronto with more hype than Brokeback Mountain — go figure). But this fall, the buzz should be fairly earsplitting for Away From Her, an adaptation of a short story by Alice Munro that marks the feature directorial debut of Sarah Polley.

Interviewed in her native Toronto a week before the film’s completion, the 27-year-old actress downplays the celebrity-director angle. Polley may be familiar to millions from her childhood work as Sara Stanley on Road to Avonlea, but visibility doesn’t necessarily translate to bankability — especially on the other side of the camera. “If anyone thought it was going to be easy for me to get money for a film,” she sighs, “it sure didn’t feel that way. It didn’t feel like I was being given any leg up.”

Hard knocks for celebrity directors too!
“I spent three or four years trying to get another film green-lit,” she explains. “It didn’t work. And then this one did, which is fantastic. But it’s tough. I’m glad that it was hard for me, because I think that it makes you a better filmmaker to have to fight for what you’re doing. I’m glad I got that experience, but it’s a hard thing, and I think it’s harder now than it was 10 years ago. I hope it doesn’t get harder, but I think it will.”

Not that Polley is about to retreat. She says that making Away From Her was a milestone in her young career that she describes as the “most thrilling, nightmarish, fantastic experience” she’s ever had. “Even though I’ve always really enjoyed acting, it was never something I set out to do for myself. As much as I loved it — I think it’s the luckiest, most privileged job in the world — this has a different meaning for me.

Source: Elle Canada