lies i told my little sister

Letting go isn’t easy. Through the years our mistakes and miscues stack up like pancakes, until they are this dense, starchy pile of wouldas, couldas, and shouldas. We’d knock them aside and move forward if we could, but the problem is that more often than not they affect those we care about the most…and they may not be ready to knock them aside with us.

LIES I TOLD MY LITTLE SISTER is the story of the Webber family. Growing up, the family revolved around three sisters; Sarah, Cory, and Jane. In the present, where the bulk of the story takes place, Sarah has passed away after a bout with cancer, leaving Cory and Jane to both deal with the void and move forward.

In the hopes to spur that, Jane arranges a week-long family vacation in Cape Cod for both sisters along with her husband Josh, son Timothy, and mother Laura. They stay in a town they often visited as children, bringing a great deal of memories flooding back. As if on cue, Cory runs into a guy she once crushed on as a girl, Nick Miller who still lives in town and builds boats.

While the vacation might have come with the best of intentions, it is not without difficulty as Cory and Jane have a lot of issues to work through. Cory has been very career-driven over recent years, which is a decision Jane doesn’t entirely agree with. She specifically holds Cory deeply accountable for not being there when their sister passed away. Perhaps Jane’s hope is that being back where they once spent so much time will get Cory to see the error of their ways. It might happen…or the girls might end up wrestling it out on the sands of the beach.

Families don’t come with baggage, they come with steamer trunks. Sometimes those issues boil over in the way that so many melodramas have shown us on-screen through the years. More often though, what we experience through the years is manifested through a dull-yet-constant passive aggression. LIES I TOLD MY SISTER understands that dynamic really well, and does a great job of embodying that sort of tired tension on-screen. Cory and Jane don’t scream at each other in this story so much as they pick…and pick…and pick. It’s a genuine portrayal of two siblings that each feel like the other has done wrong in life, but likewise don’t quite know what “doing right” would be.

LIES I TOLD MY SISTER feels like an effort to reclaim something – specifically the endless summers we experience as children. It’s an attempt to relive that adventurous feeling if only for a few days. The reality, as it clearly understands, is that we can never go back there again. Every once in a while though, we can catch the faintest glimmers of that moment and bask in them for a moment.

It just requires that we let go.

LIES I TOLD MY LITTLE SISTER plays NXNE 2014 this afternoon, Sunday June 15th – 3pm at The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. (official website)