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Willoughby Book Talk & Film Discussion
Oct
10
7:00 PM19:00
Events

Willoughby Book Talk & Film Discussion

WILLOUGHBY BOOK TALK

&

FILM DISCUSSION

WOMEN TALKING

BOOK BY MIRIAM TOWES (2019)

FILM BY SARAH POLLEY (2022)

Hosted by Rabia

The internationally bestselling novel based on real events—published in 2018 by Miriam Toews, the award-winning author of All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness.

Named Best Book of The Year by The New York Times.
Now a major motion picture, adapted and directed by Sarah Polley.

For several years, girls and women in the remote Mennonite colony of Molotschna have reported assaults in the night by what some in the community claim are ghosts or demons. Others blame “wild female imagination”—until several of the men behind the attacks are discovered and apprehended. While the men of the colony go into town to bail out the accused, the women meet secretly in a hayloft to determine how to respond. They have just two days to decide what to do before the men return. Acerbic, funny, tender and wise, acclaimed author Miriam Toews’s spellbinding seventh novel contains a universe of revelatory thinking about gender, justice, freedom and power.

REVIEWS

... scorching ... Women Talking is a wry, freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil, questions of free will, collective responsibility, cultural determinism and, above all, forgiveness ... The New York Times Book Review

the novel ends on a note of terrifying hope so pure and desperate and idealistic that it’s almost unbearable. The humility of the novel’s title belies the extraordinary ambition of its characters, who, reeling from trauma, sit, talk, and chart out a future within two days. The New York Review of Books.

It must have taken guts to write this novel… The improbable, almost magical result creates something redemptive from a subject that seems anything but. The Guardian

MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of seven bestselling novels: Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Irma Voth, The Flying Troutmans, A Complicated Kindness, A Boy of Good Breeding, and Summer of My Amazing Luck, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.

SARAH POLLEY is the Academy Award-winning filmmaker of Women Talking. After making short films, Polley made her feature-length directorial debut with the drama film Away from Her in 2006. Polley received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, which she adapted from the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Her other projects include the documentary film Stories We Tell (2012), which won the New York Film Critics Circle prize and the National Board of Review award for best documentary; the Netflix miniseries adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (2017); and the romantic comedy Take This Waltz (2011). Polley began her acting career as a child, starring in many productions for film and television. Her first book, Run Towards the Danger, was a #1 bestseller and winner of the 2022 Toronto Book Awards.

Women Talking is a 2022 film written and directed by Sarah Polley, based on the 2019 novel by Miriam Toews. It features an ensemble cast that includes Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Ben Whishaw, and Frances McDormand. The film premiered at the 49th Telluride Film Festival and was named one of the top ten films of 2022 by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute. It won Best Adapted Screenplay at the 28th Critics' Choice Awards, 75th Writers Guild of America Awards, and the 95th Academy Awards, where it was also nominated for Best Picture.

“…superbly inventive adaptation begins with a declaration: ‘What follows is an act of female imagination.’” The Guardian

“a timely political parable with a stellar ensemble cast..” The New York Times.

COPIES OF THE BOOK & THE FILM AVAILABLE AT THE LIBRARY.

CALL TO REGISTER: 203.488.8702

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