Introduction to Away from Her

Abstract

Brief introduction to the screening of Sarah Polley’s award-winning film Away from Her (2007), an adaptation of Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, originally published in The New Yorker (27 Dec. 1999). Described by Sarah Polley as “perhaps not the greatest love story I’d read, but the only love story I’d read,” Munro’s story focuses on Grant and Fiona, who married in their youth because he “never wanted to be away from her”, had no children, endured some betrayals, and now face Fiona’s rapid degeneration due to Alzheimer’s. Aware that this is an irretrievable process, Fiona chooses to move to a nursing home, while both story and film ask Grant and us to contemplate the multiple implications of “being away” from someone, and present us with the ultimate challenge of honouring life in the face of death, our own or another’s.