The Wolf Suit

The Wolf Suit is a personal journey into the nature of memory, trauma and denial using dramatic reconstruction as a tool for looking afresh at a set of conflicting family narratives.

Year: 2021

Director: Sam Firth

Writer: Sam Firth

Producer: Sam Firth

Executive Producer: Ivana MacKinnon (Stray Bear Films)

Cinematography: George Geddes


Synopsis

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.  

Director quote

"I wanted to show how we are all unreliable witnesses with all kinds of biases and emotional reasons for having constructed our own versions of the story – which is true of all our memories."

Sam Firth
Director, writer and producer of The Wolf Suit

More information

Sam Firth is a practicing filmmaker with an interest in both documentary and fiction filmmaking and has her own film production company - Lacunae Films. Her films explore our relationship to narrative and have won awards internationally. Sam is also a story consultant and has worked for Film Four, Screen Yorkshire and the Welsh Arts Council. She has worked as a community filmmaking practitioner winning awards for this work and is currently programme leader for the BA Filmmaking at the University of the West of Scotland. Before making shorts Sam assistant produced the cult feature Chunky Monkey starring David Threlfall and Alison Steadman in 2001. 

Header image: Still from The Wolf Suit