Sarah Polley’s Act of Imagination

Abstract

ABSTRACT:In Sarah Polley’s new film Women Talking, which won Best Adapted Screenplay at this year’s Academy Awards, a group of women ranging in age from their mid-teens to their seventies meet in a hayloft to discuss whether or not to leave their Mennonite colony. For years the girls and women have woken up bruised or bleeding, attacked in the night by what they could only understand to be ghosts or Satan. For years they have been led to believe that this was how God made them suffer for their sins. Or that they were lying, or imagining these attacks. Then they discover that several men in the colony have been drugging and raping them with the aid of cow tranquilizer. Now, they must decide if it is worth staying—or if, as mothers and wives and daughters, they will prioritize their safety by abandoning the men of the colony.