The Wolf Suit

Troubled by conflicting accounts of her parents’ break-up and the happy childhood memories of when they all lived together in Walthamstow, director Sam Firth embarks on an emotional exploration of those recollections.

The Wolf Suit is a personal documentary that uses the process of filmmaking, reconstruction and editing as a metaphor for how we remember and how we construct stories of our lives exploring notions of subjective and objective truth. The film is prompted by a contradiction between the director’s happy childhood memories and her parents’ conflicting stories. It takes us on an exploration through the past as Sam Firth’s attempts to piece together a single narrative of what happened to her family that lead to the breakdown of her parents’ relationship.

Sam’s journey starts with a set of stories that repeat and contradict each other and have become in her words “just stories”, hollow of meaning or emotional power. Sam uses different devices to try and prompt different memories and ultimately turns to reconstructions of her own memories and of her parents’ stories, bringing her parents to the set of the film to take part.

Ultimately Sam is forced to confront the ways in which we all hear and construct the stories we want to and the film itself becomes a vehicle for coming to terms with unwanted aspects of the past.