Press & Reviews

January 27, 2008
Julie Christie wins Screen Actors Guild Best Actress award
Read her acceptance speech here.

January 13, 2008
Julie Christie wins Golden Globe award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama

BEST FILM OF THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, Macleans, Now, Toronto Sun

“Extraordinary!
One of the most astonishing feature debuts by a Canadian director in ages! Intelligent, artful and beautifully understated … exquisite performances.”
Brian D. Johnson, Macleans

“Away From Her is a rare thing: a grownup love story that breaks the heart but stirs the soul. Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent are simply extraordinary.”
Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star

“Knockout performances! (Polley) couldn't have created a more personal and more moving portrait of love. (There is bound to be) hot chatter of an Oscar© run for the two leads.”
Katherine Monk, Vancouver Sun

**** (4 out of 4 stars)
“Stunning performances from Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent! Polley has crafted a subtle, achingly sad film.”
Johanna Schneller, Globe and Mail

News Releases

July 18, 2006: Away From Her, Directed by Sarah Polley, Starring Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis and Michael Murphy Receives its World Premiere at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival

Press Coverage

Note: Some of the links included here require publication subscriptions or registrations.
	March 4, 2008 Polley’s Away From Her triumphs at Genie Awards Movies by a pair of Canada’s best-known film-world personalities – Sarah Polley and David Cronenberg – dominated Monday night’s Genie Awards, which celebrated their 28th year of honouring homegrown cinema. Polley and her feature film debut Away From Her scored seven of the evening’s major honours: best picture, director, adapted screenplay, three of four Genie acting trophies and the previously announced Claude Jutra Award recognizing the effort of a first-time filmmaker.
	March 2, 2008 Away From Her, Polley feted on eve of Genies Sarah Polley and her acclaimed first feature Away From Her was the centre of attention at a special brunch in Toronto on Sunday, the eve of the Genie Awards honouring the best in film achievements in Canada.
	January 22, 2008 Juno among top Oscar nominees Toronto filmmaker Sarah Polley's Away From Her scores 2 nominations … Polley fared well with her feature film directorial debut, Away From Her. Aside from Christie’s acting nod, Polley received a best adapted screenplay nomination for her work on the Alice Munro short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain.
	December 5, 2007 Julie Christie in Away from Her hailed by U.S. film lovers Julie Christie was named best actress for her role in Sarah Polley’s Away from Her in year-end picks by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, a U.S. group of film historians, students and educators.
	August 13, 2007 2007 Directors Guild of Canada Awards Nominations Away From Her garners several nominations, including Best Feature Film and Best Feature Film Direction for Sarah Polley.
	June 8, 2007 Away From Her tops $1-million by Guy Dixon Films about older characters dealing with aging don’t have to mean box-office death, as proved by first-time director Sarah Polley’s Away from Her, which has grossed $1-million in Canada since opening on May 4, according to its distributors.
	May 7, 2007 Strong debut for Away From Her by Marise Strauss The joint push by Capri Releasing and Mongrel Media paid off for Away from Her, which connected with audiences over its debut weekend and generated nearly $63,000 on nine screens at the Canadian box office.
	May 4, 2007 Sarah Polley makes an assured directing debut by Liam Lacey Munro’s story gets a canny, admirable adaptation from Sarah Polley, the accomplished Canadian actress making her feature directorial debut. Apart from being a film about old age from a woman in her late 20s, Away from Her is a film rich in paradoxes.
	April 30, 2007 Away From Her review by Dennis Harvey Thesp Sarah Polley’s feature directorial bow “Away From Her” is a gracefully wrought study of a long-term marriage being wedged apart by Alzheimer’s.
	April 21, 2007 Respecting our elders In this podcast of the CBC Radio show Definitely Not the Opera (DNTO), they talk with Sarah Polley, who is not a senior, but is the director of Away From Her, a movie about an aging couple struggling with Alzheimer's.
	April 18, 2007 A Role About Winter for Julie Christie, a Star in Eternal Spring by Alan Riding For moviegoers who fell for Julie Christie in the 1960s (and they were legion), she will always be the tousle-haired blonde with the dazzling smile who lit up the screen in “Darling,” “Doctor Zhivago” and “Far From the Madding Crowd.” Today they need not feel disappointed. In her new movie, “Away From Her,” which opens on May 4, she is still a tousle-haired blonde with a dazzling smile.
	March 22, 2007 Sarah Polley adds director to resume by Belinda Goldsmith From child star, to political activist, to the thinking man’s pin-up, to film director, Sarah Polley’s varied career has made her one of Canada’s most talked about actresses.
	February 10, 2007 Lights, camera and, finally, some action Call them die-hard optimists, but a steely young crop of Canadian directors sees hope on the horizon for the feature films they love to make by Gayle MacDonald … Polley is thrilled, but bemused, by the industry’s emerging profile: She hazards a guess that the outlook for making commercially viable English-Canadian film has improved simply because morale had no place else to go but up. “It’s just been such a hard time, for so long, and now there seems to be this little window opening, of hope, to get our movies financed.”
	January 30, 2007 Pinsent, Hutt nominated for ACTRA best actor honours Pinsent, 76, has been named for his role as the husband of an Alzheimer’s victim in the Sarah Polley film Away from Her … Kristen Thomson, one of Pinsent’s co-stars in Away from Her, is nominated for outstanding female performance … Wendy Crewson, 50, will receive an ACTRA 2007 Award of Excellence. Crewson just joined the cast of ReGenesis and also co-starred in Away From Her as manager of a care facility.
	December 22, 2006 Top 10 of 2006: Sarah Polley She's had a milestone year in front of and behind the camera. But she hasn’t let the bright Hollywood lights distort her vision by Liam Lacey If you were to cast Sarah Polley in a Shakespeare play, the role would probably have to be that of The Merchant of Venice’s Portia: a young woman of outward equanimity and inner secret purpose, with a sense of justice tempered with charity.
	December 13, 2006 And this country's best films are … Jury's Top 10 list is just as notable for the movies that didn't make the cut by Liam Lacey The Top 10 films include three documentaries about the environment, one feature film mostly in the Inuktitut language (Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn's The Journals of Knud Rasmussen) and dramas about Alzheimer's disease (Sarah Polley's feature directing debut, Away from Her) and political radicalism (Reginald Harkema's Monkey Warfare).
	November 24, 2006 Canadian films head to India Sarah Polley’s Away from Her will be screened in Mumbai this January to highlight Canadian culture during an Ontario Trade Mission to India.
	September 14, 2006 Sarah Polley: a star is reborn, behind the camera Directing her first movie, the ever-precocious Sarah Polley finds magic in age-old love by Brian D. Johnson Six years ago, Sarah Polley was flying home from Iceland when she first read Alice Munro's story about a woman who forgets she has a husband after a lifetime of marriage.
	September 13, 2006 Coupland, Polley showcase Canadiana at TIFF In her directorial debut Away From Her, Sarah Polley also incorporates elements of Canadiana into her film: residents in a nursing home cheer for the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, a character is seen reading a book by Canadian author Alistair Macleod and appliances are bought at Canadian Tire.
	September 13, 2006 Lionsgate Gets Away From Her Lionsgate (NYSE: LGF), the leading independent filmed entertainment studio, has acquired U.S. distribution rights to Sarah Polley’s critically acclaimed and audience pleasing drama AWAY FROM HER, it was jointly announced today by Lionsgate’s President of Acquisitions and Co-Productions Peter Block and President of Theatrical Films Tom Ortenberg. The studio plans a Spring 2007 release.
	September 11, 2006 Away from Her draws us close to husband's anguish by Geoff Pevere The winter sun may shine intensely throughout most of Sarah Polley's Away From Her, but the movie's real subject is darkness closing in.
	September 10, 2006 The New View Sarah Polley discusses her moving directorial debut, Away From Her by Katrina Onstad Perhaps it’s because as a former child actor, she grew up in an adult world, or perhaps she is just a young fogey, but the directorial debut of Sarah Polley, 27, has the assuredness of a film made by someone twice her age. Eschewing the hipster-soundtracked coming-of-age story that often marks the first outing of a young director — no Garden State gauze here — Polley has made Away From Her, a hushed, handsome adaptation of an Alice Munro story about a long-married couple in the throes of Alzheimer’s.
	September 7, 2006 From TV starlet to director, via a road less travelled by Leah McLaren "No one should have to go through puberty in a period costume," says Sarah Polley, fixing her interviewer with an unnerving, blue gaze that makes it almost impossible to tell whether she's joking. She cracks a smile and the clouds part. "It's really embarrassing." As she sits in the Café Diplomatico, in Toronto's west end, there is little of the crinoline-clad child star Canadians came to know in the '90s.
	September 7, 2006 We're here, let's make a deal! by Guy Dixon … Away From Her had Toronto-based Capri Releasing signed up for Canadian distribution when the film was still in its script stage, roughly a year and a half ago.
	July 27, 2006 Sarah Polley interview on CBC Radio's Sounds Like Canada Sarah Polley speaks to Sounds Like Canada host Jian Ghomeshi about her directorial debut, Away From Her. (Real Media, ~20 minutes)
	July 18, 2006 World Premiere of Sarah Polley's Feature Debut Away From Her a Gala Presentation at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival Sarah Polley — the Canadian actress who rose to fame in the early 1990s as the star of CBC-TV's Road to Avonlea and has starred in films such as The Sweet Hereafter, eXistenZ, Go and My Life Without Me — makes her debut as a director at this year's festival.