Waiting for Someone to Begin
Updated: 1 day ago
By Julie Sisk | August 18, 2026
“Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”
I came across this Native American proverb recently, and it made me think about something so fundamental that we rarely stop to consider it.
Human beings tell stories.
Other species communicate. They warn one another of danger, teach their young, recognize family and remember.
But as far as we know, we are the only species that takes experience—something that happened yesterday, a thousand years ago, or never happened at all—and turns it into a story.
And we've been doing it for as long as we've been human.
Long before there were books, movie theaters, television screens—or film festivals—there were stories.
We told them around fires. We painted them on cave walls. We passed them from one generation to the next. Stories taught us where we came from, warned us about danger, explained things we couldn't understand, and helped us imagine lives beyond our own.
And thousands of years later, we're still doing the same thing.
A story scratched onto a cave wall eventually became a novel, a play, a radio broadcast—or a movie.
Only the technology changed.
The impulse to communicate is remarkably unchanged.
Someone has something they want another human being to experience.
For me, that is the magic of storytelling.
A song, a dance, a play, a novel, or a film can take a fact, an idea, a place, or an experience completely removed from our own lives and make us feel it.
For the moment we see the world through someone else's eyes. We don't simply learn what happened. If the storytelling is successful, we can appreciate what it might have felt like to actually be there.
And perhaps that's why stories stay with us in a way facts sometimes don't.
We may forget the statistics in a documentary, but remember the person whose story it told. We may forget every detail of a historical event but never forget the film that made that moment real to us. And sometimes a fictional character can help us understand something about ourselves that no amount of explanation ever could.
Stories turn information into connection, empathy and understanding.
For as long as human beings have gathered, we have told each other stories.
The campfire became the theater.
The storyteller became the filmmaker.
And thousands of years later, we're still gathering in the dark, waiting for someone to begin.
Take2 Film is heading to the Venice Film Festival in a couple of weeks — we will be waiting in the dark, excited for the stories to unfold.
Let the magic begin!
Warmly,
– Julie
