Sarah Polley’s Oscar-nominated film “Women Talking” arrives on DVD and Blu-ray this week, two weeks after its VOD debut on Amazon, iTunes and other platforms. It’s just in time to catch up with the drama before the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday, where the film is nominated for best picture and Polley is nominated for best adapted screenplay.
“Women Talking” is Polley’s fourth feature film, and she adapted the screenplay from the 2018 book by Miriam Toews, a novel described as a “reaction through fiction” (the film is described as a “work of female imagination”). It’s based on events that took place from 2005 to 2009 on the Manitoba Colony, a Mennonite community in Bolivia. Women and girls were waking up to injuries from sexual assault with no memory of their attacks, and it was discovered that men from the colony were drugging and raping them at night.
In “Women Talking,” Toews, and then Polley, imagine a conversation between a group of the women from “the colony” who have to decide whether or not to do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. It unfolds over the course of about a day, when the attackers have been taken to jail by local authorities, and without the looming specter of the men in their community, the women debate their beliefs, experiences and fears, and ultimately come to a collective decision.
