Synopsis
A groundbreaking film memoir, based on the filmmaker's own personal experiences, this HBO Films presentation tells the story of Jennifer Fox (Laura Dern), a globetrotting documentarian and professor living an apparently enviable life with her boyfriend (Common) in NYC. That world is turned upside down when her mother (Ellen Burstyn) discovers a story Jennifer wrote at 13 depicting a "special" relationship she had with two adult coaches, Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki) and Bill (Jason Ritter), in a North Carolina horse camp. Reading the pages of "The Tale," Jennifer realizes the coded details she composed 40 years ago are quite unlike her recollection. Deeply shaken yet determined to square her version of events with the truth, she sets out to question her two coaches and other girls who attended the camp. As Jennifer's seventh-grade self-reawakens, the loving stories she told herself for decades begin to unravel. Seamlessly toggling between past and present, writer/director Jennifer Fox forges a fresh and uncompromising cinematic language to penetrate the heightened internal worlds of her character at two pivotal stages. Shocking, emotionally raw and destabilizing, The Tale punctures the insidious workings of unchecked power and lays bare the mechanisms of memory -- refashioned over time by a growing girl in order to not only survive, but to prevail.