In Sarah Polley's new Oscar-nominated film Women Talking, a group of Mennonite women who've been sexually abused secretly gather in a barn to discuss their future.
The Canadian actor-director said that despite the film's difficult subject matter, the "utopian experiment" of making it left her a more optimistic person.
"I couldn't go through this experience and not come out with a whole lot more faith in people," she told Kim Hill.
Sarah Polley Photo: Christopher Wahl
Women Talking is based on Miriam Toew's 2018 novel about the abuse of over 100 women and children in an isolated colony in Bolivia. It has been nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
To create a film version, Polley and her producers Frances McDormand and Dede Gardener crafted an unusually supportive working environment with shorter days, the option to take breaks when the material was especially intense and an on-set therapist available to all cast and crew.
"'I've always had this [idea] that [a more supportive working environment] would create a better film anyway. That if people felt taken care of or seen or protected, they'd be willing to take bigger risks anyway and it would actually make for better work. It was really wonderful to actualise that experiment and have the support of the producers in doing so.
"The cast and the crew were such a magnificent group of people who were just giving everything they had every day. It was so egoless … everyone was constantly celebrating each other's victories, making space for each other. It was a really beautiful thing to behold."
Women Talking centres on the "wild debate and conversation" between a group of women who, after years living in an isolated ultraconservative community, often do not agree on the best way forward.
For Polley, their situation reflects the need for women to build on conversations kicked off by the #MeToo movement by together focusing on the change they want to create.
In the film, a Biblical quote becomes something like a shared mantra: "Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy - think about such things."
Polley – who sought to be respectful and nonjudgmental towards the Mennonite faith in Women Talking – doesn't believe religious faith itself is "the problem".
The film's characters do not reject their faith as much as re-examine it, she said.
"I think what they're doing is trying to parse out what is true for them and good and valuable and necessary and essential about their faith and how do they move closer to those things - and realising that actually requires them to move away from the power structures that have sprung up around [it].
"Ultimately I think it's about them moving closer to their faith, rather than away from it."
Forgiveness is a concept that the Mennonite women spend a lot of time exploring in Women Talking, Polley said, and their definition of it evolves.
"At first, [forgiveness] means something very simple and immediate and by the end of the film, it means something much more layered and complex that also has to do with getting themselves out of harm's way before they can even begin to think about it properly."
The nature of forgiveness is something Polley thinks about a lot and also a mind-state she hopes to arrive at – if she is not there already.
"When it comes to ways I've been harmed or hurt, forgiveness is a bit of a north star and something I really aspire to. If I haven't achieved it already it's on my radar as something I'd like to get to. I just think it can't come at the cost of repressing anger and sadness."
Women Talking is in New Zealand cinemas from 16 February.
Related: Sarah Polley: 'I feel a kind of lightness now' (2022)
Actor, writer and director Sarah Polley talks to Jesse Mulligan about her new essay collection Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory.
