Sarah Polley's 'Women Talking' Goes Into Wide Release

Women Talking, the latest film by Canadian director Sarah Polley, has been on the awards junket train since its release during the 2022 Telluride Film Festival on September 2. It debuted in the U.S. just before Christmas weekend on Friday, December 23, in limited release, to rave reviews and included on the Top Ten Films of 2022 by the AFI and the National Board of Review. With the Academy Award nomination announcements at the end of January, the film will now go into wide release for U.S. audiences beginning Friday, January 20, 2023.

The film stars an incredible ensemble of Claire Foy (The Crown), Jessie Buckley (The Woman in White), Ben Whishaw (This is Going to Hurt), Rooney Mara (Carol), Judith Ivey (Elementary), and Frances McDormand (The Tragedy of Macbeth), with the first three garnering accolades for the performances in the film. Based on the 2018 novel by Miriam Toews, inspired by the real-life sexual abuse case that came to light in the ultraconservative Mennonite community in Manitoba Colony, Bolivia, where girls and women would regularly wake up in the mornings to discover they had been sexually violated (the youngest victim was three years old, and the oldest was 65).

Initially dismissed as ghosts, demons, or "wild female imagination," a group of colony men had rendered households unconscious and raped the women. In Polley's statement and the film's release, "Though the backstory behind the events in Women Talking is violent, the film is not. We never see the violence that 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."