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There’s already a substantial amount of buzz surrounding the upcoming film Women Talking by Oscar-nominated writer-director Sarah Polley. The feature made its way through the festival circuit earlier this year, premiering at Telluride Film Festival in September, and it has already received several awards, nominations, and acclaim from critics. After a successful festival run, Women Talking will finally make its theatrical release right before the holidays on December 23rd. Ahead of its premiere, a second trailer has officially been released, painting an even darker picture of the women’s lives within the male-dominated religious community.
The opening line, “Do Nothing. Stay and Fight. Leave,” sets the stage for the chilling two-minute and thirty seconds trailer. New clips are shown, depicting the complicated physical and emotional aftermath of the sexual assault that the Mennonite women have had to endure. As the trailer progresses, viewers truly begin to see the women struggle as they ponder their options for survival, while also trying to reconcile with their faith. Though the plot follows women in a deeply patriarchal religious sect from 2010, the leaden weight of women addressing trauma, healing, and forgiveness while navigating patriarchal power systems still rings true today.
The award-winning film is based on the 2018 critically acclaimed eponymous novel by Miriam Toews which is loosely based on real-life events that took place at the Manitoba Colony in Bolivia. Women Talking is set in 2010, following a close-knit group of eight women living in an isolated Mennonite community who are bound by strict religious traditions. After the women discover the repeated acts of violence committed against them by the colony’s men as they slept, they must come to terms with their new horrifying reality and decide on how to move forward — in their religion and as a community. It’s a race against time to weigh their potential options as the women only have a two-day window to come up with a collective answer to the men’s crimes before they return.
1/1 There Will Not Be Physical Depictions of Sexual Violence in the Film
Sarah Polley’s Women Talking touches on a highly sensitive, trigger-worthy topic, sexual assault. Depictions of the touchy subject in media still tend to lean more on the graphic side, even now in a post-Me Too era. However, Polley decides to approach the violent acts in an innocuous way. Instead of giving screentime to the physicality of the assaults, the movie shifts the focus to the lingering questions, discussions, and revelations the women must face as they struggle to find the right course forward.
“Though the backstory behind the events in Women Talking is violent, the film is not,” Polley said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “We never see the violence that the women have experienced. We see only short glimpses of the aftermath. Instead, we watch a community of women come together as they must decide, in a very short space of time, what their collective response will be.”
It’s an excellent way to shift the narrative away from the men’s unsavory actions by instead centering the women’s deliberation and resilience as they try to pave the best path forward. Although some of the women are afraid of the religious repercussions and the men’s retaliation, others are ready to do whatever it takes to ensure not only their safety and survival but for future generations as well.
Women Talking includes an ensemble cast consisting of Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Ben Whishaw, and Frances McDormand, who also serves as a producer on the film. He is joined by producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner. Polley is at the helm of the feature drama as both the director and writer of the screenplay.
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