A woman filming a documentary on childhood rape victims starts to question the nature of her childhood relationship with her riding instructor and running coach. 

The most powerful experience I’ve had at a theater this year is during Jennifer Fox’s The Tale at Sundance, but it won’t be the way the majority of viewers experience this harrowing tale of sexual abuse. Perhaps for the better due to the depiction of its subject matter, HBO picked up the Laura Dern-led film and will premiere it next month. Ahead of the release, they’ve now debuted the first trailer.

When letters are unearthed revealing more about a “relationship” when she was 13, Fox (Dern) starts to not only investigate in the present-day, but excavates the memories that she’s repeated since the trauma and opens a dialogue with her younger self (Isabelle Nélisse). What she perceived as a relationship was, in fact, repeated rape. Directed by Fox herself, The Tale is an emotionally debilitating drama, the powerful kind that makes one want to scream rage at the events on the screen, but are choked by silence as the credits roll, comprehending the irrecoverable damage caused to the protagonist and the director, as the events are based on her own life.

Soviet secret police began a series of mass executions circa 1940 of Polish citizens they knew would reject foreign occupation upon WWII’s completion. Some of the resulting graves were discovered in the Katyn Forest three years later with more found elsewhere totaling 22,000 bodies. Because of the diplomatic relations necessary to join the Allied nations with the “enemy-of-my-enemy” USSR, official word on the Katyn massacre stated Nazi Germany was to blame. This lie was crafted with obvious intentions: America and Britain needed to placate Joseph Stalin and the Soviets needed Poland to retain a modicum of good will towards their new rulers by manufacturing a worse villain. Writer/director Piotr Szkopiak’s grandfather was one of the innocents murdered and The Last Witness is his way of honoring their memory.