by PENNY SMITH
Women Talking follows a group of women and girls living in an isolated, socially regressive religious colony who learn they have been repeatedly sexually assaulted while drugged unconscious. The feature, written and directed by Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley, was adapted from the 2018 novel of the same title by Miriam Toews. It was awarded Best Adapted Screenplay at this year’s Academy Awards and nominated for Best Picture.
The film and novel are based on events that occurred on the fundamentalist Mennonite commune of “Manitoba” near Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The colony, founded in 1991, derives its name ultimately from Mennonite communities in the western Canadian province of Manitoba. The approximately 2,000 residents speak Plautdeutsch (Mennonite Low German), dress “plainly” and do not use electricity or automobiles.
In 2011, seven men were convicted of drugging and raping more than 130 women and children between 2005 and 2009. An eighth man was later convicted of supplying the drugs.
Polley’s film begins with a sweeping montage of events in the immediate aftermath of the crimes. A shocked woman, Ona (Rooney Mara), lying in bed, looks down at her badly bruised thighs and cries for her mother. A young narrator recounts that “when we woke up to hands that were no longer there, the elders told us it was the work of ghosts, or Satan… It went on for years, to all of us.”
An enraged mother, Salome (Claire Foy), forces herself into a house and stabs her male attacker before she’s wrestled to the ground. The male assailants are escorted out of the colony and into police custody “for their own protection.” The narrator continues: “Almost all of the men of the colony went to the city to post bail for the attackers. We were given two days to forgive the attackers before they returned. If we did not forgive them we would be ordered out of the colony and denied entry into the kingdom of heaven.”
A title card reads, “What follows is an act of female imagination.”
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