UNBROKEN
IN WOMEN TALKING, A GROUP OF SEXUAL- ABUSE SURVIVORS MEET TO DISCUSS HOW TO MOVE FORWARD. WE BROUGHT DIRECTOR SARAH POLLEY TOGETHER WITH HER CAST TO TALK STRENGTH AND POWER.
WORDS ELLA KEMP
Original sketches from the film all by Liv McNeil, who plays Neitje.
There is, acknowledge the cast and crew of Women Talking, a belittling joke that people might not go and see a film that tells the story of that title so literally. That would be their loss. The story begins in a hayloft in a Mennonite (an Anabaptist Christian denomination) colony, where nine women talk about how to move past sexual abuse at the hands of men. Women Talking absolutely delivers on its title — but these women, and this film, couldn’t be more alive.
Adapting Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel of the same name, it presents countless parallels with our world: the #MeToo movement, of course, which began a year before the book was published, but also the routine silencing and reducing of women to little more than tools and muses — apractice that permeates a patriarchal society.
Writer-director Sarah Polley, political activist and former actor, has dealt with abuses of power first-hand. In a 2017 New York Times op-ed, she wrote about her deeply troubling experience with Harvey Weinstein, and in her 2022 memoir Run Towards The Danger talked of being sexually assaulted as a 16-year-old.
The women in Polley’s film are brave, intelligent, furious, hopeful human beings. Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Rooney Mara play the most vocal in the colony, protecting their young and looking to a new future. Empire sat down with them and Polley to hear them talk — with passion, sometimes anger, but always hope — about the power of women, and how to build a better world together. And that can be joyous — but it’s anything but a joke.
How did this material touch you, having dealt with micro- and macro-aggressions yourselves, in the film industry and beyond?
Sarah Polley: The book went through me like a bullet. It raised so many earth-shattering philosophical questions that we’ve all been grappling with over the last five or six years, and it shattered a lot of assumptions about my own beliefs. I just found myself in this constant mode of questioning after reading it.