Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

Run Towards the Danger, a film by Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director, and performer Sarah Polley, examines memory and the conversation between her past and present.

These tales are the riskiest I've ever heard. The ones that have kept me up many a night, the ones I have avoided, and the ones I haven't told. These stories became lighter and easier to carry when they found resonance in my adult life and then moved in a different, better direction than they did when I was younger.

Actress, playwright, and director Sarah Polley is praised for her honesty, nuance, and profound empathy in her work. She contributes all of those attributes to these six articles, in addition to her superb storytelling abilities. Each one examines the prospect of reliving the past again as the person she is now but was not then, the fallibility of memory, and the possibility of capturing a fragment of Polley's life as she recalls it. The past and present are engaged in a "reciprocal pressure dance," as Polley puts it.

Polley muses over anecdotes from her own life, including danger, high-risk delivery, stage anxiety, and more. After battling the aftereffects of a concussion, Polley saw a physician who offered her completely different advice: in order to heal from a traumatic injury, she needed to charge forward the exact behaviors that brought on her symptoms in order to retrain her mind to strength. She demonstrates, with compelling clarity, the value of using the same guidance to discover a way forward and a way through in other aspects of her life. She had to go toward the threat rather than remain in a defensive crouch.

Polley delves into the experience of living in one's body, always evolving, learning, and changing, in this remarkable book.