Sarah Polley
Sarah Polley is the director of the film who also appears as herself. Polley is also an actress perhaps best known for his long-running stint on the Canadian TV show Avonlea. In 2008, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for writing Away From Her. Her list of credits on IMDB is enough to make any question their own work ethic: double digit figures in each category as an actress, writer and director. The documentary ultimately becomes a revelation of a shocking secret about her parentage.
Diane Polley
Sarah’s mother Diane died in 1990, long before the production of the film began. As a result, her appearance in the film is through both the actual archival home movies of the family and by actress Rebecca Jenkins in the film’s “recreation” of home movies. The result, of course, is that Diane Polley is a member of the family who does not get to tell her own story. She was a casting director and actress before her premature death from cancer.
Michael Polley
Michael Polley was married to Diane until her death. He had started out pursuing an acting career until his marriage and the birth of his children convinced him to seek the steady employment of an insurance agent. When Sarah’s career took off, however, his role as her on-set guardian eventually brought him back to his first love and he appeared in a number of TV series throughout the 1990’s. It was naturally assumed that Sarah was Michael’s biological daughter, but the film reveals that this was not the case.
Harry Gulkin
Harry Gulkin was a Canadian film producer and stage director. During the 1950’s he contributed the weekly communist newspaper, the Canadian Tribune before suddenly renouncing the ideology supposedly in response to learning of the darker aspects of Josef Stalin. That this renunciation occurred when the blacklist was still going strong in Hollywood is probably entirely coincidental, of course. He is revealed to be the biological father of Sarah Polley.
