Words matter. They give expression to our experiences, allow us to tell our stories and make sense of our place within the world. With language comes the ability to speak: to speak for, and to speak out. To name injustices and imagine alternative futures. The radical feminist Audre Lorde tells us that our silence will not protect us, that we must turn our silence into words, and those words into action.
The director Sarah Polley’s Women Talking follows a group of women as they find the language to talk about their experiences of violence and collectively imagine a future that might bring an end to the harms they have endured at the hands of men. Based on Miriam Toews 2018 novel of the same name, both the film and the book are an imagined response to a series of real-life sexual attacks on a group of women in a Mennonite community in Bolivia.
The film is set almost exclusively in a barn in which the women of the colony hold a secret meeting to determine whether to stay or leave following the attacks. Crucially, the women are unable to take the minutes of their meeting, as they can’t read and write, reminding viewers of language’s power to exclude; that language is man-made and so serves those who created it.
