Women Talking

It's not just about representation, it's about acknowledgement,” says 'Women Talking' director Sarah Polley ahead of the 2023 Oscars.

It made a huge difference and I’m not sure I would have been able to come back to making films if that hadn’t been the case. Let’s rewrite the rules.” The producers made a commitment really early on for us to have civilised hours and be able to get home, to see our kids and whoever else we were taking care of. I said that I’d love to direct it too, but that didn’t seem viable to me, and I sort of floated the idea of changing the regular hours of a film set to accommodate people being able to see their families or loved ones. That’s Polley in a nutshell – an empath who’s made a deeply empathetic film: a big-screen adaptation of Miriam Toews’s compelling novel of the same name about a group of women in a Mennonite colony who discover that they’ve secretly been drugged and raped by the men in their community over a number of years. I read that Women Talking was recommended to you at a book club meeting. As they argue over their options – to forgive and do nothing, to stay and fight, or to leave – we learn about their lives, what they’ve endured, and their visions for the future.