HOME / ENTERTAINMENT / MOVIES

HBO movie 'The Tale' shows director Jennifer Fox revealing the truth about how she grappled with her own childhood abuse

Dern's character comes face-to-face with life-altering questions when a short story that she had written at the age of 13 for a school project is found by her mother

The upcoming film by HBO, The Tale, has been written and directed by Jennifer Fox, who is an American film producer and director.

The Tale revolves around the life of Jennifer (played by Laura Dern) as she comes face-to-face with life-altering questions when a short story that she had written at the age of 13 for a school project is found by her mother who calls her in a panic. This forces Jennifer to go back to the memory of her first sexual experience and look at the situation through a microscope. Along the way, she finds out that what she thought was an innocent and pure experience as a child was actually something far more sinister. The plot of the film also focuses on how she realizes that she told herself certain stories of the encounter to make them seem normal when it was actually something else entirely.

The story is based on writer-director Fox's own personal story of abuse when she was a child.

This film has been in the works for a while now and it was reported on May 5, 2015, that Laura Dern, Ellen Burstyn, Elizabeth Debicki, and Sebastian Koch would star in The Tale. The film began the principal photography that very summer and on May 14, 2016, and was also shopped to foreign buyers at the Cannes Film Festival. Common, Jason Ritter, Frances Conroy, and John Heard are also being part of the cast.

Fox reportedly thought about her new film while finishing her episodic, six-hour portrait of female sexuality, Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman. She thought of spinning 'The Tale' into more of a meta-text, revisiting her past trauma as part of a grueling exercise. "I had to blow the lid off traditional storytelling," Fox says according to Rolling Stone. "It's about unraveling denial, using myself as the red thread."

Fox is also the president of Zohe Film Productions, she won the Grand Jury Prize for her first feature-length documentary, Beirut: The Last Home Movie. Her 2010 documentary, My Reincarnation, was premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) and it ended up winning a Top 20 Audience Award.

The HBO film will debut on Saturday, May 26 at 10:00 p.m. (ET/PT)