Sarah Polley [dot] Org - sarahpolley.org

Filmography

2006

COCK & BULL
Character: ?
Director: Matt Nix
Summary: A woman trapped in an unhappy marriage to an alcoholic husband transforms into a man.

2005

BEOWULF & GRENDEL
Character: Selma
Director: Sturla Gunnarsson
Summary: An epic tale based on the 9th century Anglo-Saxon poem, "Beowulf," which inspired Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings".

Venting a life long grudge against the men who killed his father, monstrous troll Grendel embarks on a murderous campaign against a Danish settlement whose besieged king beseeches the aid of legendary warrior Beowulf.

When Grendel returns to wreak his nightly slaughter in the king's great hall, Beowulf and his band of monster slayers are ready and waiting. But the sly troll evades his ambushers by fleeing into his labyrinthine cave and Beowulf resorts to an ignoble trick, luring him out with hostage Selma, a town outcast who strangely doesn't fear Grendel and who shares with the creature a mysterious congress. When Beowulf slays the vengeful troll in a grisly, bloody engagement, Selma mourns while the others rejoice. However, the revelry is short lived as Grendel's mother, the even more terrifying Sea Hag begets her own revenge.

Hunting the sea creature to her lair beneath the ocean, Beowulf discovers the startling secret connecting Selma to Grendel and battles the fearsome Sea Hag in a confrontation that will commit his name to legend for the ages.

THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS
Character: Hanna
Director: Isabel Coixet
Summary: Hanna is a mysterious and shy woman who has a boring life and works in a factory. But she is obliged to go to a small village on holidays. By chance, Hanna visits an oil rig for sereval days, where she has to care for Joseph, a man suffering from severe burns. She meets interenting people there: Dimitri, a Russian soldier; Simon, a Spanish cook; Martin, an engineer who has a weird friendship with Lisa, a goose Simon wants to kill; and Liam and Scott, an English couple. In the rig has occured events nobody wants to talk about, but they are very important in order to understand the lives of those people.

DON'T COME KNOCKING
Character: Sky
Director: Wim Wenders
Summary: Howard Spence (Sam Shepard) has seen better days. Once a big Western movie star, he now drowns his disgust for his selfish and failed life with alcohol, drugs and young women. If he were to die now, nobody would shed a tear over him, that's the sad truth. Until one day Howard learns that he might have a child somewhere out there. The very idea seems like a ray of hope that his life wasn't all in vain. So he sets out to find that young man or woman. He discovers an entire life that he has missed ...

2004

SIBLINGS
Character: Tabby
Director: David Weaver
Summary: Joe (Alex Campbell) and his siblings have a couple of problems. First off, their stepparents are despicably evil. Secondly, they seemed to have killed them. Now this mixed up mess of half-sisters and step-brothers have to figure out how to dispose of the bodies, cover up the murders, collect their grandfather's inheritance and somehow stick together as a family -- all without getting caught. Not to mention Joe's incessant need to keep tabs on his promiscuous sister, an eye on the precocious little ones and a lustful watch on the girl next-door. Growing up has its complications. Murder's just one of them.

SUGAR
Character: Pregnant Girl
Director: John Palmer
Summary: A provocative and challenging coming-of-age story between Cliff, a restless suburban teen, and Butch, a street hustler, on the eve of his 18th birthday. Butch challenges Cliff's sheltered upbringing by exposing him to a different world that changes Cliff forever.

DAWN OF THE DEAD
Character: Ana
Director: Zack Snyder
Summary: A young female nurse, named Anna, is caught in the middle of a world-wide chaos as flesh-eating zombies begin rising up and taking over the world and attacking the living. She escapes into the streets and is rescued by a black police officer, named Kenneth. Together they find shelter in a mall along with a group of other survivors. For a while everything is ok, but pretty soon, they start running out of food, the power goes out, and the dead keep finding ways to break through their defenses. Realizing they're sitting ducks, they make a plan to head for an island by using two armored mall shuttle busses to get across the sea of zombies.

2003

LUCK
Character: Margaret
Director: Peter Wellington
Summary: Shane Bradley, who is fixated on ideas of luck and destiny, tries to win the girl of his dreams. After their relationship falters, Shane begins to think he might be unlucky and turns to gambling as an outlet for his obsession.

DERMOTT'S QUEST
Character: Gwen
Director: Grimur Ardal

MY LIFE WITHOUT ME
Character: Ann
Director: Isabel Coixet
Summary: Ann, 23 years old, lives a modest life with her two kids and her husband in a trailer in her mother's garden. Her life takes a dramatic turn, when her doctor tells her that she has uterine cancer and only two months to live. She compiles a list of things to do before she dies, arranges her family life and falls in love to a lonely man she met in a laundromat.

THE EVENT
Character: Dana
Director: Thom Fitzgerald
Summary: An intense relationship drama that takes the form of a mystery, The Event centers around a series of unexplained deaths that occur among the gay community in New York's fashionable Chelsea district. Nick, a district attorney investigating the most recent case, a suspicious apparent suicide, and her interviews with friends and family of the deceased trigger extensive and intricately interwoven flashbacks that reveal surprising facts about the man's life and death.

THE I INSIDE
Character: Clair
Director: Roland Suso Richter
Summary: A man (Phillippe) awakens in a hospital not recalling the last two years as he begins to find out things from his past he discovers his ability to move from the year 2002 to the year 2000. By doing this he meets a link between the two time periods (Lang).

2001

NO SUCH THING
Character: Beatrice
Director: Hal Hartley
Summary: Disgusted with human evolution and a society driven by instant gratification and voyeuristic sensationalism, a foul-mouthed Monster kills anyone who crosses his path. When a news crew sent to investigate the Monster disappears, their ratings-obsessed boss sends a guileless young woman to follow up on the story. This young journalist forges an unlikely friendship with the Monster.

LIFE AND TIMES (TV Series)
Character: Narrator (in episode "My Beat: The Life and Times of Bruce Cockburn" on November 27)
Director: Christopher Bavelles
Summary: Biographies of famous Canadians.

2000

THE CLAIM
Character: Hope Burn
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Summary: Based on Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Claim follows the story of Daniel Dillon, who traded his wife and newborn daughter for a gold mine. 20 years later he is thrown into a kind of hell in the prospecting city he controls is being surveyed as potential railroad route and the wife and daughter that he hocked for his riches show up as well.

THE LAW OF ENCLOSURES
Character: Beatrice
Director: John Greyson

LOVE COME DOWN
Character: Sister Sarah
Director: Clément Virgo
Summary: Love Come Down is the gripping tale of two brothers in their early 20s, one black, one white, each the other's keeper since their family was torn apart by a decade old tragedy. Neville, played by Larenz Tate, is a comedian struggling with his comedy, and his brother, Matthew, played by Martin Cummins, is a boxer consumed with the pleasure and pain of his skin. Neville becomes enchanted with Niko (Deborah Cox), a beguiling young singer who becomes entangled with him on his journey of self-discovery. With the support of their long-time friend Julian (Rainbow Sun Francks), and Sister Sarah (Sarah Polley), a nun with a past, Neville and Matthew come to understand love in all its forms.

THE WEIGHT OF WATER
Character: Maren Hontvedt
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Summary: A newspaper photographer, Jean, researches the lurid and sensational axe murder of two women in 1873 as an editorial tie-in with a brutal modern double murder. She discovers a cache of papers that appear to give an account of the murders by an eyewitness. The plot weaves between the narrative of the eyewitness and Jean's private struggle with jealousies and suspicions as her marriage teeters.

THIS MIGHT BE GOOD
Director: Patricia Rozema

1999

MADE IN CANADA (TV Series)
Character: Rhonda (in episode "It's A Science" on November 8)
Director: Jerry Ciccoritti

THE LIFE BEFORE THIS
Character: Connie
Director: Jerry Ciccoritti
Summary: In Toronto, after a holdup goes awry, two gunmen kill or wound several people at a cafe. A flashback takes us through the victims' day. Sheena, a talkative woman approaching middle age, vacillates about showing up for a blind date. Jake, an attorney who has "borrowed" from a client's trust fund, faces ruin when she dies. Maggie, the ugly-duckling daughter of a TV star, gets an audition on her own and may be late for her shift at the cafe. A laconic bug exterminator, grieving for his dead daughter, goes through a day of pain and memory. Two prepubescent girls set up an elderly teacher on a charge of sexual impropriety. Can any make decisions that change the shooting outcome?

GO
Character: Ronna Martin
Director: Doug Liman
Summary: Told from three perspectives, a story of a bunch of young Californians trying to get some cash, do and deal some drugs, score money and sex in Las Vegas, and generally experience the rush of life.

EXISTENZ
Character: Merle
Director: David Cronenberg
Summary: Allegra Geller, the leading game designer in the world, is testing her new virtual reality game, eXistenZ with a focus group. As they begin, she is attacked by a fanatic assassin employing a bizarre organic gun. She flees with a young marketing trainee, Ted Pikul, who is suddenly assigned as her bodyguard. Unfortunately, her pod, an organic gaming device that contains the only copy of the eXistenZ game program, is damaged. To inspect it, she talks Ted into accepting a gameport in his own body so he can play the game with her. The events leading up to this, and the resulting game lead the pair on a strange adventure where reality and their actions are impossible to determine from either their own or the game's perspective.

GUINEVERE
Character: Harper Sloane
Director: Audrey Wells
Summary: Connie, an aging Bohemian photographer, meets mousy Harper, headed for Harvard Law from a high-powered San Francisco family, and immediately sees her beauty. He also guesses she has talent and invites her to be his pupil and share his bed. He's Alfred Stieglitz, she's Georgia O'Keefe, and he calls her his Guinevere. When she realizes she's the latest Guinevere in a string of ingenues, she bolts, only to return, sick of her family. She's blossoming, reading, learning, but hasn't yet taken her first photograph when he tells her they're going to L.A., broke, him drinking too much, to sell some photographs. On the trip, she finally snaps the shutter; so does her awe and dependence.

1998

LAST NIGHT
Character: Jennifer 'Jenny' Wheeler
Director: Don McKellar
Summary: At the turn of the century, the end of the world is known to be coming to an end. This modest comedy-drama examines how the impending doom affects its cast. McKellar plays an architect who plans to meet the end alone at dinner. Others (Sandra Oh, David Cronenberg) make a suicide pact, but are caught apart and struggle to get together before the end. Another man (Callum Keith Rennie) pursues final sexual conquests and a milquetoast woman (Tracy Wright) strives to gain courage. Of course, the group ends up interacting.

WHITE LIES
Character: Catherine Chapman
Director: Kari Skogland
Summary: Catherine (Sarah Polley), a first-year university student who feels alienated from the liberal campus, joins a hate group through the Internet and becomes their voice, only to gradually question their beliefs even as she becomes more deeply involved.

JERRY AND TOM
Character: Deb
Director: Saul Rubinek
Summary: Tom and Jerry are two hit men, they work by day at a third-rate second-hand car dealership. Tom is a veteran and Jerry is a novice in their business, and their attitude toward their profession differs a lot. It shows when Tom is required to kill his old friend Karl.

1997

THE PLANET OF JUNIOR BROWN
Character: Butter
Director: Clément Virgo
Summary: This is the story of an extremely obese, rather immature, yet very bright and talented young man, and of his world and the people in it... mostly homeless young adults... who refer to their lives and where they live as their individual "planets," and everyone else as "refugees." But there are problems in his world, where a talent for the piano has been reduced to playing Chopin on a piano that has had the strings cut by his mother out of frustration at his incessant practicing... the same mother who now requires him to be there to administer her insulin shots. Still, because he is a 'good boy', he plays on the soundless piano, and takes weekly lessons from a piano teacher so eccentric that she will only allow him to strum out the notes on her dining room table... until, like real planets when other bodies get too close, he finds himself pulled and moved in a different direction.

THE HANGING GARDEN
Character: Teen Rosemary
Director: Thom Fitzgerald
Summary: William, a once obese and troubled teen, goes back to his family's home after being gone, without word, for ten years and finds it (and his family) haunted with his past. He had moved to the city and become a fit, well-adjusted gay man, but during his visit home, he becomes unhinged as the newly remembered reasons for his miserable adolescence come to life in each of their presents.

THE SWEET HEREAFTER
Character: Nicole
Director: Atom Egoyan
Summary: A small community is torn apart by a tragic accident which kills most of the town's children. A lawyer (Ian Holm) visits the victims' parents in order to profit from the tragedy by stirring up the their anger and launching a class action suit against anyone they can blame. The community is paralysed by its anger and cannot let go. All but one young girl (Sarah Polley), left in a wheelchair after the accident, who finds the courage to lead the way to the sweet hereafter.

1996

CHILDREN FIRST!
Director: Jacques Vallée

JOE'S SO MEAN TO JOSEPHINE
Character: Josephine
Director: Peter Wellington

STRAIGHT UP (TV Series)
Character: Lily
Director: Jerry Ciccoritti

1994

TAKE ANOTHER LOOK
Character: Amy
Director: Richard Mortimer

EXOTICA
Character: Tracey Brown
Director: Atom Egoyan
Summary: The 'Exotica' is a nightclub on the outskirts of Toronto, where Eric, DJ and MC, watches nightly as his ex-girlfriend Christina performs. Watches jealously, especially as far as the extra attentions regular customer Francis garners are concerned. Thomas, meanwhile and erstwhile, goes through a series of, um, interesting situations involving his pet shop, a gruff taxi-sharing stranger, unexpected tickets to the opera and smuggled eggs of a rare bird. Multiple story lines unfold in a splendid tangle of cutbacks, forward and backward references and recurring themes, all woven around the Exotica, its customers and employees. A calm roller-coaster ride of a movie, visually and intriguingly and emotionally moving. O, and the sound track is notable, too.

1993

THE HIDDEN ROOM (TV Series)
Character: Alice (in episode "Dangerous Dreams" on June 12)
Director: Graeme Campbell
Summary: This half-hour anthology show usually featured a woman in hardship, musing about might-have-beens, or fighting for her life, such as a woman being visited by the ghost of the child she never had, a housewife discovering her own courage while battling a gang of thugs, a woman being visited by the romance novel hero in her head, or playing dangerous games of theft and sex with her own husband. In the third season, the format became more open-ended and generally Twilight-Zonish, such as the man who thinks he might be a werewolf.

1991

JOHANN'S GIFT TO CHRISTMAS
Character: Angel
Director: René Bonnière

1990

LANTERN HILL
Character: Jody Turner
Director: Kevin Sullivan
Summary: Jane has been living all her life with her mother under the thumb of her repressive grandmother. Then she goes to live with her father for the summer, and discovers a new life of freedom and friends such as the street urchin, Jody, and the mysterious Mamzelle Hepzibah. But she must return to her grandmother's house sometime. Jane makes up her mind to bring her parents together before that time comes.

1989

BABAR: THE MOVIE
Character: Young Celeste (voice)
Director: Alan Bunce

ROAD TO AVONLEA (TV Series)
Character: Sara Stanley
Director: Richard Benner
Summary: Inspired by the works of popular Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery ('Anne of Green Gables'), the lives of the children and adults of Avonlea, Prince Edward Island in the first decades of last century.

1988

THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN
Character: Sally Salt
Director: Terry Gilliam
Summary: The fantastic tale of a 17th century aristocrat, his talented henchmen and a little girl in their efforts to save a town from defeat by the Turks. Being swallowed by a giant sea-monster, a trip to the moon, a dance with Venus and an escape from the Grim Reaper are only some of the improbable adventures.

RAMONA (TV Series)
Character: Ramona Quimby
Director: Randy Bradshaw
Summary: Eight-year-old Ramona Quimby feels that no one really understands her. She's bright, imaginative, and according to her older sister Beezus, a "pest." Every day she tries to find out more about herself and her world, with an optimism that only children possess. The series follows Ramona's adventures in school and at home as her family struggles with financial woes and the coming of a new baby.

1987

BLUE MONKEY
Character: Ellen
Director: William Fruet
Summary: While working in a greenhouse, a man receives an insect bite after touching an exotic plant. Immediately, he falls ill and is taken to an emergency room where the doctors diagnose him as suffering from an unknown bacteria, and a strange parasite which emerges from his mouth as a large slimy wormlike creature. Soon, there are more cases of bacterial infection, but the more immediate problem for the hospital is the wormlike creature which after accidental exposure to a genetic growth stimulant grows to monstrous proportions and starts a reign of terror and bloodshed in the hospitals abandoned wing.

THE BIG TOWN
Character: Christy Donaldson
Director: Ben Bolt
Summary: It is 1957. J.C. Cullen is a young man from a small town, with a talent for winning at craps, who leaves for the big city to work as a professional gambler. While there, he breaks the bank at a private craps game at the Gem Club, owned by George Cole, and falls in love with two women, one of them Cole's wife. Infuriated, Cole wagers everything on the craps table, including the Gem Club itself, and he and Cullen have it out.

HANDS OF A STRANGER
Director: Larry Elikann
Summary: A New York cop becomes obsessed with finding his wife's rapist.

PRETTYKILL
Character: Karla
Director: George Kaczender
Summary: A detective tries to track down a serial killer who is murdering prostitutes while at the same time having to deal with his girlfriend's mental problems, which are gradually deteriorating into a split personality.

HEAVEN ON EARTH
Director: Allan Kroeker
Summary: Heaven On Earth follows several children and teens as they are sent from their homes in Wales and England to Canada. Host families await them and each child must adapt to their new surroundings, deal with their new duties and families and survive by holding into their friendships. Heaven on Earth is based on historical events and focuses on the trials and hardships of children who were unwanted but ultimately found their place in the world.

FRIDAY THE 13TH (TV series)
Character: Mary (in episode "The Inheritance" on September 28)
Director: George Bloomfield
Summary: An old antique dealer made a pact with the Devil to sell cursed antiques. When he dies, his store is inherited by his niece Micki and her cousin Ryan. With the help of Jack Marshak, they fight to retrieve the antiques from the people who bought them to stop them from causing harm.

1985

ONE MAGIC CHRISTMAS
Character: Molly Monaghan
Director: Phillip Borsos
Summary: An angel must show a mother the true meaning of Christmas. It's not just presents and materialistic things, but the people she cares about.

As A Director

2006

AWAY FROM HER
Summary: In November 2005, it was announced that the Harold Greenberg Fund was financially backing 24 film scripts in development, including one by Polley. She is adapting the Alice Munro short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," which has been optioned by Pulling Focus Pictures. Rechristened "Away from Her," the story is about a philandering husband married to a woman afflicted by Alzheimer's disease.

Read our "Away From Her" special

2004

THE SHIELDS STORIES (TV Series)
Summary: One day, Tracey hurts her leg dancing, is dumped by her boyfriend, finds out her parents -- a deaf father and a sex-starved, dipsomaniac mother -- are seperating, and gets hit by a harp that falls out of a window.

2002

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS

2001

I SHOUT LOVE
Summary: Bobby is about to abandon Tessa, but in a suicidal panic she persuades him to stay one last night and reenact the good old times in front of a video camera for posterity

1999

DON'T THINK TWICE
Summary: Jake is in bed with his mistress, Casey. They're in Jake's city apartment; Jake's wife and his son Sam are at the family home somewhere out in the 'burbs. Casey gets up to go downstairs. The portable phone rings. It's Jake's wife: Sam's being obstreperous and stubborn, and Jake's got to talk some sense into him. With his wife on the line, Jake hears a loud noise and realizes Casey has fallen down the stairs. She's seriously hurt. What's he going to do: take care of Casey or deal with his wife and son?

THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE