The feature-length directorial debut of Canadian actress Sarah Polley, the film is based on Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came over the Mountain", from the 2001 collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.
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The film stars Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie as a couple whose marriage is tested when Christie's character begins to suffer from Alzheimer's and moves into a nursing home, where she loses virtually all memory of her husband and begins to develop a close relationship with another nursing home resident.
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Sarah Polley was on a flight back from working on Hal Hartley's No Such Thing in Iceland when she read the Alice Munro short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" in The New Yorker.
It would lead to other films on the subject, including the movies The Savages and Away from Her.
To date three films, Le Confessional, Atanarjuat and Away from Her, have won both the Claude Jutra Award and the Best Picture Genie in the same year; all three films' directors also won the award for Best Director for the same films.
In 2006, "The Forgetting" was featured on-screen and read aloud in the Sarah Polley film "Away From Her."
The lake scenes from the Canadian film starring Gordon Pinsent called Away From Her were also shot in the township on the south shore of Lake of Bays across from Price's Point.
Steven Millhauser's story "Eisenheim the Illusionist," which inspired Neil Burger's 2006 film The Illusionist, Alice Munro's story "The Bear Came Over The Mountain," which Sarah Polley adapted into the film Away From Her in 2006, and Wes Anderson's screenplay for the short film Hotel Chevalier in Winter 2007 are recent examples of All-Storys Classic Reprint.