The Forward Momentum of 'Women Talking'

Sarah Polley captures the magnitude of leaving in her new film, Women Talking, an adaptation of Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel. When I first heard about the project, I didn’t think I could bring myself to watch it, though I read and admired the book. The story is inspired by the real-life women and girls of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, who for years were drugged and raped by a group of men in their colony and made to believe it was ghosts or Satan who had violated them — or maybe just an act of “wild female imagination.” In 2009, nine men confessed to the rapes after two of them were caught entering someone’s home, and in 2011, seven were sentenced to 25 years in prison. (The eighth was sentenced to 12 years for supplying the anesthetic spray designed for livestock; the ninth escaped.) Officially, 130 women and girls between the ages of 3 and 65 were raped, though the real number is likely higher.