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At a bustling polling station in the Lahore district where Imran Khan is seeking a parliament seat, the attitudes of Pakistani voters reflected the intensity of the contest between the former cricket star and former two-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Khan had ignited a passionate following among the country's youth as he campaigned for a "New Pakistan" and hoped to re-draw the electoral map. Nearly 40 million new young voters were added to the rolls this election.

First-time voter Bilal Ahmed, 22, sports a T-shirt that reads, "Love, Respect, Support for Imran Khan," whose PTI party symbol on the ballot was a cricket bat.

"Imran Khan is saying that we will stand as a nation, whereas the other parties are still considering [taking] loans," he says. "We don't need loans. We want to stand by ourselves, we will support ourselves, we will rise as one nation. ... We don't need loans; we need jobs. We need industry in our country. We don't want to be begging around the world. We don't want that. We want to be one nation that stands by itself."

In 2008, Rebecca Posamentier visited StoryCorps with her mother, Carol Kirsch.

"My mom was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, and I was hoping to get her voice and her thoughts on tape before she couldn't express them anymore," Posamentier said recently during a second visit to StoryCorps.

Kirsch died in March 2011, but during that first visit, Posamentier chatted with her mother about well, motherhood.

"Um, Mom was very insecure, because she had polio as a child, and she had a limp for pretty much all her life," Kirsch said about her own mother. "She felt that she was not whole somehow, so I had a rocky relationship with Mom. And I was afraid to have children for many years, but I'm so glad I did."

At the time of the first StoryCorps visit, Posamentier was in the late stages of pregnancy with her first child. She asked her mother what she wanted to share with her granddaugher once she was born.

"Well, I'd want her to know that she's going to be very loved," Kirsch said. "And, you know, I've told you that I was worried that my Alzheimer's would get worse, and that I wouldn't be able to spend time I want with her. I really hope I can do that for a while."

And, for the first two years the grandmother and granddaughter were very close.

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In Polley's documentary, that recollection is accompanied by home-movie images of them building a snowman — conventional documentary footage, you might say. Other moments are less conventional. There are stops and starts in the voice-over — because Dad isn't just a character in this story, you see; he's the narrator, too, which gives the film a very intimate feel.

That only gets enhanced when her brothers and sisters drop one story on Sarah they might not tell someone else.

"I remember Johnny saying [that] your father might be someone that Mum had acted with in a play," one brother observes. "I remember we talked about how you didn't look like Dad," a sister says. "And Dad joked about it."

Those reminiscences about an elusive mother turn into a search for clues that will literally explain how this filmmaker came into the world. And though that might keep another director occupied, it's just the start here, because no two children, no two friends — no two lovers, even — paint the same portrait of Diane Polley. Mum was adventuresome but trapped, says a kid, dutiful but wild, says a confidant, talented (maybe) and unfulfilled (sometimes) and by many accounts a shy extrovert.

And as her youngest daughter processes all these contradictions, an exercise in family navel-gazing becomes something more meta — less about the stories themselves than about the often uproarious ways in which people tell stories.

Including the filmmaker, whose previous fictional treks behind the camera — the Alzheimer's love story Away from Her, for instance — have hardly been conventional. Here, she trips up your expectations right through the final fade.

Seriously, one of the most jaw-dropping revelations occurs halfway through the final credits. All of which makes the stories Sarah Polley tells in Stories We Tell an enormously intriguing lot. (Recommended)

After retiring as Pakistan's most celebrated cricket player, Imran Khan has dabbled on the margins of Pakistani politics for nearly two decades, trying to make a mark.

The sportsman turned philanthropist who led a playboy lifestyle in his younger days has attracted endless media attention but until now neither he nor his movement has had any real impact.

As Pakistanis vote in a crucial parliamentary election on Saturday, could this time be different?

Watching Khan in the final stretch of the race is to see a man who found it impossible to stop campaigning. His critics have called him a political dilettante in the past, but he now seemed addicted to the center of the political arena as the blue jean and T-shirt clad youth of the country mobilized behind him and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI party. He has benefited as discontent with the traditional political elite has begun to boil over.

The former national cricket team captain looked supremely confident in the final weeks of the campaign, relishing the throngs of supporters and sparring with television anchors.

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