(Women Talking movie poster)

This review discusses sexual violence and trauma experienced by real women in an insular religious community in South America in the early 2000s. It is also an account of how these women and their stories are reimagined for film, a fictional narrative that considers how they respond to these events as individuals, listen to one another, and collectively determine whether it is possible to move forward with their faith intact.

1. Hayloft Assembly

A self-declared act of “female imagination,” Women Talking began as a novel by Miriam Toews before it became an Oscar-winning film adapted and directed by Sarah Polley. Both women, however, worked with knowledge that their art came from life: it really is true that more than 130 women and girls in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia were drugged with cow tranquilizer and raped by their male neighbors and kin between 2005-2009. It’s also true that eight men were convicted and sentenced to prison for these crimes in 2011 (with one still at large). Whether the survivors experienced justice or healing through these legal means is not a matter of public record.

“Where I come from,” the film’s narrator explains, “we [women] didn’t talk about our bodies. So when something like this happened there was no language for it.” Her words convey a reality of religious conservatism rendered more complicated given that the Mennonite women in Bolivia largely couldn’t speak Spanish like the men of their colony could. Unable to read or write even in their Low German language meant that these women couldn’t testify to local officials without mediation, let alone receive psychological treatment after the attacks.

But if brought together to discuss what really happened, what might these women say? Women Talking ventures a speculative answer, where catharsis takes shape in an intimate and unvarnished depiction of women not simply talking but collectively reimagining their future.

In the film, after two men from the community are caught trying to enter the room of a teenage girl (Neitje, played by Liv McNeil), they confess to the rapes and name the other men involved. The offenders are sent to jail, and the remaining men of the colony—with the exception of August (Ben Whishaw), a schoolteacher who recently returned to the community after his family had been excommunicated—follow them into the city to post their bail. The male elders have counselled the women to decide whether or not they will forgive their attackers. If they don’t, the elders warn, the women will be forced to leave the colony and be denied entry to heaven. With this ultimatum, the women take the unusual step of voting on their course of action: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. With the vote tied between fighting and leaving, and a mere 48 hours before the men return, the women turn to deliberation. They elect the women and girls of three families to assemble in the hayloft and make a decision for everyone.

The grandmothers start the proceeding with a quintessential ritual of Christian humility—a scene of foot-washing both gentle and playful. They are in no rush to gather their weapons or pack their bags. The girls in their braids giggle as the women wash their feet; the intimacy and vulnerability of hands stroking unadorned feet and pregnant bellies symbolizes the work of service that the women are about to perform. In this scene, Agata (Judith Ivey) dries and kisses the feet of her daughter Ona (Rooney Mara), an unmarried woman made pregnant by her rapist. She smiles at her mother as the camera narrows in on her stomach, signaling the intergenerational stakes of what is about to occur.

In encountering these moments, the viewer is not a voyeur or a fly on the wall, but intentionally positioned in situ. We are meant to sit among the women, meet their gaze, and see them as they saw each other—without makeup, unplucked eyebrows and all. Only then can they honestly share the grief that afflicts them. Director Sarah Polley accomplished this vulnerability by shooting dozens of—and in some cases over a hundred—takes of a single scene to capture each actor’s reactions. The shift in perspective allowed for subtle yet emotionally-driven character development and the illusion of movement in a film set largely in one location—a hayloft.

(A scene from Women Talking)

The film’s pacing is both conversational and consequential: the women talk, listen, and argue, taking breaks to milk the cows and feed the children, all while they debate the meaning of forgiveness and the possibility of salvation for a woman who withholds it. The viewer more accustomed to the pressures of car chases to move the plot along may start worrying that they’d better hurry up before the men get back. But the women take their time. They hear each other out, sometimes raising their voices in disagreement and other times turning to prayer and song to console each other. Finding a path of action that keeps the women and their children safe without violating their communal commitments to non-violence proves difficult, but it is a responsibility they take seriously. Their understanding of justice grows out of their willingness to change their minds to fulfil the duty of deliberation that the other women in their community gave to them. One woman’s salvation is therefore inextricably linked with her responsibility to her kin and her community.

Women Talking puts women at the center of the storytelling both on- and off-screen. Polley, who won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, worked alongside acclaimed producers Frances McDormand and Dede Gardner to lead a predominantly female cast (Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Judith Ivey, Rooney Mara, Sheila McCarthy, and Frances McDormand, among others). Polley has repeatedly described the film as an act of community, including in her jubilant acceptance speech at the Oscars.

When asked to write and direct the film, Polley thought deliberately about how to avoid telling a story about sexual violence that viewers could distance themselves from by writing it off as merely a tale of religious conservatism. She did not want to give “a secular audience permission” to say that “this could never happen here.” For Polley, Women Talking is about all of us, not only Mennonites. Setting the film in an undisclosed locale in the year 2010, Polley portrays Toews’s novel in “the realm of a fable;” a fiction informed by her own understanding of gendered violence beyond the world built within the hayloft. A film about white Christian women that is written and performed by white women, Women Talking tells stories of sexual assault, victim blaming, and attempts to control women’s bodies through Christian stories of salvation.

Yet the film also asks audiences to withhold judgment. Religion in the film is both a source of pain and of possibility.

In working with an ensemble cast, Polley has been lauded for her “democratic method” on set, where she prioritized collaboration and good working conditions for the cast and crew. She hired an on-set therapist and ensured that each day of shooting ended at a reasonable hour so no one would have to miss time at home with their families. Polley’s feminist approach to filmmaking is born out of her own trauma as a child actor and a woman in an industry that often calls for its workforce to sacrifice their personal lives, and even their personal safety, for the sake of making a “good” film. (Polley’s recent memoir, Run Toward the Danger, reflects on these experiences).

2. The Mennonite Question

Though Polley chose to avoid direct reference to the Bolivian Mennonite community in Women Talking and did not use the word ‘Mennonite’ in the script, Toews playfully noted during the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere that “all Mennonites will know that they’re Mennonites.” Most viewers will also pick up on the women being some sort of Christian, but what does that mean?

Mennonites, like the Amish, are an Anabaptist strand of Christianity that formed during the Protestant reformation in Europe. Taking their name from an early leader, Menno Simons (1496-1561), the basic tenets of the faith are two-fold: (1) only mature, consenting adults can choose to be baptized and (2) one’s life should be guided by acts of service and pacifism, oriented by the idea that violence is unjust and that conflict should be peaceably resolved. Historically, both tenets set Mennonites at odds with the state and dominant church, and they sought out places to live where the ruling powers would grant them the privilege to practice their faith in relative isolation. Over time, they developed a reputation as good farmers because of their collective (but arguably still capitalist) social organization. Many waves of migration brought Mennonites from Prussia to Russia and then to Canada and the United States. By the nineteenth century, their agrarian prowess made them attractive immigrants who were often at the vanguard of settler-colonialism in North America.

Finding a context in which Mennonites could exercise their religious freedom without state intervention, fear of persecution, or risking cultural assimilation meant being a religion on the move. The Mennonite community in Bolivia where the “real story” occurred is called the Manitoba Colony. Its members are descendants of Russian Mennonites who first immigrated to Canada in the 1870s, settling as a block in the new province of Manitoba, which was Anishinaabe and Métis land. The Canadian government promised this Indigenous land to the Mennonites, along with a “Privilegium,” which guaranteed their autonomy to educate their children and abstain from military conscription.

By the 1920s, the government had decided that Mennonites should start sending their children to public schools, which were taught in English. This perceived imposition motivated many Manitoba Mennonites to move to Mexico, where the government allowed them to set up new reserves, or colonies, with increased autonomy (e.g., no police intervention in community matters) to work the land and preserve their German and Low German languages, while enforcing strict boundaries with the non-Mennonite world.

Inevitably, new disputes over “worldliness” and assimilation emerged within Mexican Mennonite communities, and splinter colonies multiplied. Mennonites sought out new states, including Bolivia, Belize, and Paraguay, that would grant them religious freedom in exchange for their agricultural skills; and so they continued to turn Indigenous lands into agrarian colonies.

The situation at the Manitoba Colony fell into the state’s domain when one woman accosted two men entering her home in June 2009. Those men confessed to the community rapes, and criminal proceedings took place after they named the other men involved. According to a journalist who covered the criminal trial in 2011, the Manitoba Colony was established in 1991 and is one of over seventy communities in Bolivia, many of which arrived as early as the 1960s.

(Mennonite women in Bolivia. Image source: Lisa Wiltse/Corbis via Getty Images)

Mennonite separation from “the world” has long depended on policing the bodies and minds of women. In these conservative South American communities, women’s isolation has been compounded by illiteracy, lack of Spanish speaking and reading skills, and the fact that elders forbid them from education and from marriage outside the community. As anthropologist Paola Canova has shown in her research on Mennonite colonies in Paraguay, men’s engagement with “the world” is less regulated than women’s and is facilitated by their literacy and knowledge of Spanish. Canova even details how Mennonite men regularly leave their colonies to seek out sex workers, mostly Indigenous Ayoreo women.

3. We are Bruised

When the women of Manitoba came forward to the community’s male leaders about their experiences of waking up bruised and bleeding in beds soiled with dirt, journalist Jean Friedman-Rudovsky explains that “the council of church ministers, a group of men who govern the 2,500-member colony,” dismissed their testimony on the basis that the women couldn’t remember exactly what had happened. Without men to blame, the women were led to believe they had imagined things or that possibly Satan, or ghosts, had done it. Media coverage of the Manitoba Colony leaned sensational, calling the attacks “ghost rapes.” Toews expressed her frustration with this epithet, arguing that “it’s not accurate and, obviously, it perpetuates what the elders were saying to the women. Some of the women had begun to think that way themselves: ‘Could it be demons? Satan? Punishment? Ghosts?’” Disabused of their body’s record of reality, the film’s narration frames this “gaping silence” as a “real horror” that the women were left to navigate on their own.

In the film, clarity comes from the women openly talking with each other about what actually happened. A powerful monologue from Salome Friesen (Claire Foy) exemplifies this. In the setup for this scene, Mariche Loewen (Jessie Buckley), asks the women to consider the possibility that the wrong men have been put in jail. A cynical mom of many children whose husband regularly beats her, Mariche at first mocks the deliberations as pointless, but eventually brings the other women to see their own complicity in the familial power relations that afflict them. Salome, enraged over the rape of her four-year-old daughter, responds to Mariche’s questioning of the men’s guilt: “No. No! That is not our responsibility, because we aren’t in charge of whether or not they are punished. We know that we have been attacked by men, not ghosts, or Satan, as we were led to believe for so long. We know that we have not imagined these attacks … We know that we are bruised,” Salome exclaims, “and pregnant, and infected, and terrified, and insane – and some of us are dead!” Jolting us back into the reality of what they must do, she reminds the women of what they already know as true: “We … must protect our children, regardless of who is guilty.”

There are limited flashback scenes depicting the women in the aftermath of having been raped while drugged unconscious. Avoiding voyeurism, the scenes focus not on the violent act but on the women’s coming to knowledge of it. Their pain and rage are evoked as much by their screams and cries, as by the blood that stains the pattern of a handmade quilt and the white of a cotton nightgown.

As the women dwell with the question of what they should do, they spin out a new theology. Salome’s sister Ona prompts the women to consider whether forgiveness that is forced is true forgiveness at all. Given the pacifist ethic of their community, this is a serious matter that can affect each woman’s status in heaven and in the eyes of God. They know they cannot stay and fight, for they might become murderers if they do. They will not flee in fear like animals nor can they ask all of the men, guilty or not, to leave. In fact, they laugh at the absurdity of it but realize that the men and boys will truly suffer without them. For many conservative Mennonites, the household dynamic remains tethered to traditional understandings of a man as the head of his household—a husband and father to whom one should submit because God ordains it that way. However, the elected women cannot overlook how they feel or what has been done to them. As one of the grandmothers, Greta (Sheila McCarthy) advises, the women must inhale and digest the violence into fuel—to be productive, as good Mennonites should.

4. “I am not Mennonite.”

In a radio interview for CBC’s Q with Tom Power, Sarah Polley reiterates a point she has made various times throughout the media circuit surrounding the promotion of her film: “I am not Mennonite.” This declaration is not meant to distance herself from these women’s experiences but rather to make a distinction in her approach to telling their stories. She is an outsider looking in, and her account is necessarily “different from Miriam [Toews] telling this story.” Toews based her novel on the real events that took place in Bolivia, while also drawing from her own Mennonite upbringing. Toews explains that she “felt an obligation, a need, to write about these women… I’m related to them. I could easily have been one of them.”

Toews, who was raised in Steinbach, a predominantly Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada, left the community to pursue a writing career. Her books, however, remain filled with Mennonite women talking. In her memory of the Mennonite women who raised her, Toews explains that “there’s a certain kind of natural, inherent storytelling capacity … Not to the point where they’re disobedient. They know their roles and they play them. But when they get together, there’s a lot of laughter and their own kind of coded, rebellious exchange.” It is a relational spirit and emotional release that she wanted to portray in her book, and something she asked Polley to preserve in the novel’s translation to the screen. Despite the grim nature of what happened to them, laughter is how these women survive and overcome their pain. “They need it,” Polley affirms.

In many ways, this still feels like a film about Mennonites. The women deliberate with reference to biblical passages and sing hymns, always centering forgiveness and fidelity to God. But the faithfulness of Polley’s storytelling is not only intellectual and theological, it is aesthetic as well: braided hair and flocks of children; matching mother and daughter homemade dresses; the strength required to haul water and harness horses; the gentleness and humility needed to crawl on the floor with a baby. Polley’s depiction of the women at work and play provides an infrastructure for hearing their stories.

Toews and other Mennonite consultants advised Polley during her script writing and offered suggestions on the fine details of the film’s production from set design to filming locations. Mennonite consultants also worked alongside Quita Alfred, the film’s costume designer. Together, they sewed dresses and sourced fabrics that were authentic to the community’s patterns and standards of “plain dress,” sold by Mennonite shopkeepers, and reflective of the different ages and personalities of each character. The wardrobe and cinematography are therefore key elements of the film’s design that are coded as theologically conservative, drawing on a markedly Mennonite aesthetic—an aesthetic also embodied through women’s relationships to each other and to their children. 

5. Reimagining the World

Critical responses to Women Talking abound. Reviews in the LA Times and the New York Times praised it as a brilliant ensemble piece evoking the “power of speech.” A New Yorker review was less convinced, suggesting that while the script is riveting, and the directing “skillful and sincere,” the film is too conventional, the soundtrack too distracting, and the performances too sentimental and dramatic. “As a result, the movie remains more of an admirable idea, an ambitious ideal, than an experience.”

Dismissal by way of conventionality speaks to a cultural tendency to belittle women’s stories and experiences for not being as momentous as they ought to be or could have been if done or said differently. Polley responded directly to this attitude with the making of Women Talking: “Actually,” she counters, “these women and this conversation, and their willingness and ability to change their minds and change each other’s minds and to listen, should be treated as though it’s the most important thing in the world. They are literally remaking their world, and …  the future for their kids.” The decision to leave a community in which their identities are so intricately woven, and their presence so integral to its ongoing survival, is not trivial or dramatic, it is life changing.

Mennonites too have offered their perspectives on the film. Many have praised its beauty, “hard questions,” and “larger truths.” Others note their own ethical qualms about telling a story of the sexual violence in the Manitoba Colony without directly speaking to the people who live there. An act of female imagination tethered to the lives of real women and communities, Women Talking has prompted many challenging conversations in its wake.

Yet, even with the laughter and hope portrayed in both Toews’ and Polley’s accounts of what happened, knowing that the real women of the Manitoba Colony never held such a meeting and never left homes to start anew adds a sense of gravity to the story. It reminds us that not every story is heard nor does every voice have the capacity to speak it. Even if these women talking are a figment of other women’s imaginations, we should listen.

Christina Pasqua is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department for the Study of Religion and in the Book History and Print Culture Program. Her research focuses on the role of creativity and craft in how comic book artists read, interpret, and illustrate biblical stories, particularly within the context of their own lives. She also writes about autobiography, aesthetics, and depictions of gendered bodies in the arts, film, and popular culture, more broadly.

Pamela Klassen is a professor who researches and teaches the study of religion in North America and Turtle Island at the University of Toronto. Her current research focuses on colonialism, treaties, museums, and public memory. Her family roots are in Mennonite communities in Manitoba and she grew up attending a Mennonite church in Toronto, where she did a lot of talking and listening.