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Sarah Polley won her first Oscar for her Women Talking.

“First of all, just want to thank the Academy for not being mortally offended by the words women and talking with so close together like that,” she said as her film won the award for Writing (Adapted Screenplay).

“Miriam Toews wrote an essential novel about a radical democracy in which people who don’t agree on every single issue managed to sit together in a room and carve out a way forward together free of violence. They do so not just by talking but also by listening,” she added.

Related: ‘Women Talking’: Read The Screenplay By Sarah Polley That Takes On Remaking “A Broken World”

Women Talking, which came from Orion Pictures/United Artists Releasing, beat All Quiet on the Western Front, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Living and Top Gun: Maverick in the category.

The win prevented...

Everything Everywhere All at Once won big at this year’s Independent Spirit Awards, taking home seven awards out of eight nominations. The only award it didn’t win was, interestingly enough, one it did win, as Ke Huy Quan beat Jamie Lee Curtis in the Best Supporting Performance category.

Here are the winners of winners of the 38th Independent Spirit Awards:

Movies:

Best Feature:

Bones and All

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Our Father, The Devil

Tár

Women Talking

Best Director:

Todd Field, Tár

Kogonada, After Yang

Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Sarah Polley, Women Talking

Halina Reijn, Bodies Bodies Bodies

Best First Feature:

Aftersun

Emily the Criminal

The Inspection

Murina

Palm Trees and Power Lines

Best Lead Performance:

Cate Blanchett, Tár

Dale Dickey, A Love Song

Mia Goth, Pearl

Regina Hall, Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.

Paul Mescal, Aftersun

Aubrey Plaza, Emily the Criminal

Jeremy Pope,...

The Film Independent Spirit Awards selected A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once as its Best Feature on Saturday to culminate its 38th edition, one of seven wins for the metaverse-set pic that solidifies its frontrunner status in one of the last major awards stops ahead of March 12’s Academy Awards.

Everything, which had a leading eight nominations coming into daytime ceremony on the beach at the Santa Monica Pier, also scored wins for Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu in the awards’ inaugural gender-neutral performance categories across film and TV. The film also won for The Daniels’ directing and screenplay, and for Paul Rogers’ editing.

Related Story ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ Continues Awards Season Victory March With Sweep At Indie Spirits Heading Into Oscars Related Story How To Watch Saturday's Film Independent Spirit Awards Online Related Story Oscar Week 2023 Parties & Events: The List Ke Huy Quan,...

When Kate Hallett, 18, was recording the quiet, moving voiceover that bookends Women Talking, she had a lot going on. Not only was she doing work for her first feature role, she also was finishing up high school in Alberta, where she was in a production of Newsies. “It was bizarre, I will not lie,” she says. “The direction styles between my high school director and Sarah Polley are very different. It was just so confusing.”

Hallett, a native of Canada who lives at home with her parents, has had a lot of surreal experiences since the release of Women Talking, which she booked on her second-ever movie audition. They have ranged from the emotional — survivors approaching her about the impact the film had — to the giddy. (At Telluride, she got to meet Paul Mescal; she’s a big fan of Normal People.) And now, the film has earned Oscar nominations...

Stephanie Hsu, Michelle Yeoh, and Ke Huy Quan in ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ (Photo Credit: Allyson Riggs / A24)

Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan became the first Asian actress and actor to win Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role/Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Everything Everywhere All at Once also scored wins in the Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture categories.

SAG members spread out the wins in the television categories, with The White Lotus the only nominee to earn multiple awards. Additional 29th Annual SAG Awards television winners included Abbott Elementary, 1883, The Bear, Hacks, George & Tammy, and Ozark.

This year’s SAG Awards took place in Los Angeles and streamed live on YouTube on February...

The 2023 Screen Actors Guild Award nominations were announced on January 11 in film and television, as voted on by members of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation. What will prevail in the category of Best Film Ensemble during Netflix’s YouTube ceremony on Sunday, February 26? This year’s five nominated movie casts are “Babylon,” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “The Fabelmans” and “Women Talking.”

Scroll down to see Gold Derby’s 2023 SAG Awards Predictions for Best Film Ensemble, listed in order of their racetrack odds. Our SAG Awards odds are based on the combined forecasts of thousands of readers, including Experts we’ve polled from major media outlets, Editors who cover awards year-round for this website, Top 24 Users who did the best predicting the winners last time, All-Star Users who had the best prediction scores over the last two years, and the mass of Users who make up our biggest predictions bloc.

Even in the darkest times, there can still be laughter and joy. That's one of the lessons of Sarah Polley's "Women Talking," which used a sprawling ensemble cast to tell the story of Mennonite women who try to move forward together in the face of unbelievable trauma. The movie is nominated for three Oscars, including best picture. Three of the ensemble's younger members - Michelle McLeod, who plays Mejal; Kate Hallett, who plays Autje; and Liv McNeil, who plays Nietje - spoke to Popsugar about their experiences on set and why keeping laughter at the center of the weighty film was so important.

The movie, which went into wide release Jan. 20, has an all-star cast that includes Frances McDormand, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Ben Whishaw, Judith Ivey, and Sheila McCarthy. Hallett confesses that working with so many legendary actors was "incredibly intimidating." But, she adds, "I was...

(l-r) Rooney Mara stars as Ona, Claire Foy as Salome, Judith Ivey as Agata, Sheila McCarthy as Greta, Michelle McLeod as Mejal and Jessie Buckley as Mariche, in director Sarah Polley’s film Women Talking. An Orion Pictures Release. Photo credit: Michael Gibson. © 2022 Orion Releasing LLC. All Rights Reserved.

There is a lot of talk about Women Talking – awards talk. The title of this electrifying ensemble drama may suggest something tame but the fiery Women Talking is no polite, quiet chat but a deep, sarcastic, no-holds-barred, even funny, and thought-provoking discussion among a group of Mennonite women who are meeting secretly in a barn to talk about what to do after a series of brutal attacks on them.

Women in the colony have been waking up beaten, bloody and in pain, with no memory of what had happened. The men tell them they are being attacked by the devil, or...

Content warning: This article contains references to widespread sexual assault depicted in the film "Women Talking."

Do nothing. Stay and fight. Or leave. Those are the three choices the women of "Women Talking" are faced with. Based on a true story, the new film by writer and director Sarah Polley tells the story of women in a fictional Mennonite colony who learn that some of the men in the community have been secretly drugging them and assaulting them during the night for years. When a woman would wake up confused, in pain, or bleeding, the men would tell them they'd been attacked by devils or demons. At the beginning of the movie, the women finally learn the truth. Police arrest the eight men responsible, and when almost all the colony's men head to town to bail them out, the women have to decide what to do, leaving them with the three choices.

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ (Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures © 2022 20th Century Studios)

The love for The Banshees of Inisherin and Everything Everywhere All at Once has spread to the Screen Actors Guild. Nominations for the 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards have been announced and Banshees and Everything Everywhere topped the list on the film side, earning five SAG Awards nominations each.

The final season of Ozark led the TV nominations, picking up four nominations.

Winners will be announced on Sunday, February 26, 2023 at 5pm Pt/8pm Et. This year marks the first time the SAG Awards will be broadcast live on Netflix’s YouTube channel. Beginning in 2024, the awards show will stream live on Netflix.

The 2023 SAG Awards recognize the best performances of 2022 in television and movies.

SAG Awards Motion Picture Nominees:

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role

Austin Butler...

The Screen Actors Guild unveiled nominations Wednesday for its 29th annual SAG Awards as the movie awards season arrives full-steam, coming the same week as last night’s Golden Globes and Sunday’s Critics Choice Awards.

Related Story SAG Awards Find A New Home On Netflix in 2024; This Year's Show Will Stream On YouTube Related Story How To Watch 2023 SAG Awards Nominations: Ashley Park & Haley Lu Richardson Set To Announce Related Story SAG Awards 2023: No TV Home Yet For The Annual Fete

The marquee ensemble film award category this year features Paramount’s Babylon, Searchlight’s The Banshees of Inisherin, A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, Universal’s The Fabelmans and United Artists’ Women Talking. Banshees and Fabelmans are having a good week, having taken the top film prizes at last night’s Globes.

Banshees and Everything Everywhere led all films with five nominations apiece in today’s noms announcement.

Sarah Polley’s Women Talking features a large ensemble of accomplished and award-winning actresses, so it would not have been a surprise to see one (or several) take the stage Thursday at the Palm Springs Film Awards, where Polley was honored with a director of the year prize.

But instead it was Eric Idle, the Monty Python star, who presented Polley with her award. His appearance was especially profound for Polley as it provided a public reunion for the two co-stars from Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. “About 34 years ago, I was on the set of a movie in Rome and I said farewell to a little girl of 8 who starred in the movie,” Idle said. “We had all been scarred on this movie … going on nine months before we’d been able to escape.” Idle called some of the scenes “life-threatening.”

It has come to light...

MGM’s Orion Pictures and Audible Theater have partnered for “Women Talking: An Evening of Wild Female Imagination,” a one night only special theatrical event at Audible’s off-Broadway Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City. The Jan. 9 event will feature director Sarah Polley and cast members Jessie Buckley, Sheila McCarthy, Michelle McLeod, Liv McNeil, August Winter and Kate Hallett for an evening showcasing three new works inspired by the film.

Playwrights Sandra Delgado, Ruth Tang and Brittany Allen have written pieces inspired by the film centered around the idea of women coming together to decide what’s best for their community. The evening will also include a conversation with Polley and the playwrights, led by Tony Award nominee and Pulitzer Prize finalist Heidi Schreck. Zoe Chao is also part of the program, performing a monologue by Brtittany Allen. Two-time Tony nominee Eva Noblezada will perform Billie Eilish’s “My Future.

Some want to stand their ground and fight — after all, this is their home, too. Many want to leave and start anew. There’s an option to vote for doing nothing, but really, the days of simply enduring and ignoring are long gone. The choices that a group of women face in Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, her adaptation of Miriam Toews’ book, basically boil down to: Should they stay or should they go?

What has brought the various female members of a Mennonite community to this point is an epidemic.

Women Talking Image: United Artists Releasing Women Talking is a story that is neither showy nor conventionally cinematic. Miriam Toews’ novel is largely an expression of ideas through discussion in a single location, with conversational threads blurring together in prose resembling hastily scribbled notation. Writer-director Sarah Polley’s big screen...

Women Talking Review — Women Talking (2022) Film Review, a movie directed by Sarah Polley, written by Miriam Toews and Sarah Polley and starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Ben Whishaw, Frances McDormand, Judith Ivey, Emily Mitchell, Kate Hallett, Liv McNeil, Sheila McCarthy, Michelle McLeod, Kira Guloien, Shayla Brown, Vivien Endicott Douglas, August [...]

Continue reading: Film Review: Women Talking (2022): Sarah Polley’s Film is an Artistic Triumph That Tackles Difficult Subject Matter...

Harry Shum Jr. and Michelle Yeoh in A24’s ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ (Photo credit: Allyson Riggs)

Everything Everywhere All At Once tops the list of 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards nominees, earning eight nominations including Best Feature, Best Director (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert), Best Lead Performance (Michelle Yeo), Best Breakthrough Performance (Stephanie Hsu), and two in the Best Supporting Performance category. Director Todd Field’s Tár, starring Cate Blanchett as a world-renowned composer whose life is falling apart, followed with seven nominations including ones for Field and Blanchett.

The 2023 awards will mark the first time Film Independent has switched the performance categories to gender-neutral. The 38th Film Independent Spirit Awards also introduces a new category: Best Breakthrough Performance.

“We couldn’t be more honored to celebrate this year’s exciting film nominees,” said Josh Welsh, President of Film Independent. “As the Film Independent Spirit Awards evolve with our changing industry,...

Celebrating its 38th edition, the Film Independent Spirit Awards have unveiled their 2023 nominations, with the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once leading the pack with eight nominations while Todd Field’s TÁR secured seven. Along with those two, rounding out the Best Feature nominations were Bones and All, Our Father, the Devil, and Women Talking. Elsewhere, some of our favorites of the year––including Aftersun, Murina, The African Desperate, The Cathedral, After Yang, All That Breathes, Saint Omer, and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed––were recognized.

Check out the nominations below ahead of the March 4 ceremony.

Best Feature (Award given to the producer)

Bones and All

Producers: Timothée Chalamet, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, Luca Guadagnino, David Kajganich, Lorenzo Mieli, Marco Morabito, Gabriele Moratti, Theresa Park, Peter Spears

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Producers: Daniel Kwan, Mike Larocca, Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, Daniel Scheinert, Jonathan Wang

Our Father, the Devil

Producers: Ellie Foumbi,...

Sarah Polley will receive the Director of the Year Award for “Women Talking” at the Palm Springs International Film Awards, which will take place in-person on Jan. 5 at the Palm Springs Convention Center. The Palm Springs Film Festival runs through Jan. 16.

“Sarah Polley continues her outstanding work as a writer and director in her latest film ‘Women Talking.’ She brings together a stellar cast in her adaptation of the Miriam Toews book, taking us on a cinematic journey filled with raw emotions and performances,” said Festival Chairman Harold Matzner.

Past recipients of the Director of the Year Award include Jane Campion (“The Power of the Dog”), Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Steve Mc Queen (“12 Years a Slave”), Alexander Payne (“Sideways”), Jason Reitman (“Up in the Air'”), David O. Russell (“The Fighter”), Quentin Tarantino (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”) and Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”) who all went on to receive Best Director Academy Award nominations.

MGM and United Artists Releasing have revealed their acting submissions for all of their titles, particularly “Bones and All,” “Till” and “Women Talking.”

“Women Talking,” written and directed by Sarah Polley, has opted to put Rooney Mara up in the best actress category while the rest of her female co-stars — Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Michelle McLeod, Kate Hallett, Liv McNeil, August Winter, Kira Guloien and Shayla Brown — will campaign in supporting actress. The most prominent male actor in the film, Ben Whishaw, will be the only one campaigning for best supporting actor.

Mara enters a very stacked lead actress race that includes Cate Blanchett (“Tár”), Viola Davis (“The Woman King”) and Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”). The universal acclaim for the film adaptation of the popular book could help propel her into the fold, especially given her two prior nominations for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...

Here’s a look at this week’s biggest premieres, parties and openings in Los Angeles and New York, including red carpets for Black Adam, Halloween Ends, The Watcher and the New York Film Festival.

New York Film Festival

The annual film fest continued its second week at Lincoln Center with screenings for Women Talking, Armageddon Time, She Said and The Inspection.

Claire Foy, Judith Ivey, Michelle McLeod, Sheila McCarthy, Sarah Polley, Rooney Mara, Kate Hallett and Liv McNeil attend the red carpet event for ‘Women Talking’ on Oct. 10 in New York City. Producer Marc Butan, Focus Features vice chairman Jason Cassidy, Jeremy Strong, Anne Hathaway, director James Gray, Banks Repeta, Jaylin Webb, Focus Features president of production and acquisitions Kiska Higgs, Focus Features chairman Peter Kujawski and producer Rodrigo Teixeira at the ‘Armageddon Time’ screening on Oct. 12. Jodi Kantor, Zoe Kazan, Megan Twohey and Carey Mulligan attend the red...

Warning: The following contains references to sexual assault.

Following a strong run on the film festival circuit, Sarah Polley's drama "Women Talking" is getting a theatrical release by United Artists Releasing. This is a difficult story: It's an account of victimized women within an insular community trying to take back their power, despite being at a significant — and purposeful — disadvantage. Only men are allowed to receive an education and take leadership roles within this settlement, and as a direct result of the systemic sexism running rampant through the population, the core values of their faith have been corrupted. Men have been violently sexually assaulting the women and children, and if nothing is done, this behavior will certainly continue.

"Women Talking" is what the title implies: a story centered around women talking about their situation and trying to plan their next move. The film is an adaptation of Miriam Toews' novel of the same name,...

The women in question here belong to a secluded rural religious order on unidentified prairieland and the talking they do throughout Sarah Polley’s immaculately made, intellectually adventurous and politically incisive new film consists of an ongoing debate that will determine the futures of these mostly young women.

Of course, Polley is really addressing all women—and men as well—who are on board with the considerable political and societal changes that have taken place over the past few years and only show signs of accelerating. Engaging an array of excellent actors to portray women in different phases of life, the writer-director draws upon egregious attitudes and behavior of the past and present to envision a significantly altered future, one that can already be glimpsed if you squint your eyes and stand in the right direction–or, as a young Black New York filmmaker hoped for and envisioned more than three decades ago,...

Sarah Polley, at the Telluride Film Festival for the world premiere of Women Talking, her latest film as a director, acknowledged how lucky she was as an actress to have worked with so many female filmmakers. They told her to be “fierce” when they saw that she wanted to work behind the camera.

Women Talking, based on Miriam Toew’s celebrated novel about a group of Mennonite women having to confront sexual assaults committed by men feeding their desires, is a powerhouse exploration of the female imagination.

“This film began with three women talking a lot,” Polley said. She was referring to Dede Gardner as producer through Plan B Entertainment, and Frances McDormand as a cast member and producer via her Hear/Say Productions, and Polley herself.

Polley cited three female directors she’d worked with who helped pave the way for her as a director: Audrey Wells on her 1999 feature Guinevere; Kathryn Bigelow,...

Click here to read the full article.

When Sarah Polley was in her 20s, just starting to direct short films, she got lots of advice from female directors she worked with as an actor, like Kathryn Bigelow, Audrey Wells and Isabel Coixet. “These women grabbed onto me and said, ‘You’re doing it, and here’s how fierce you’re going to have to be,'” Polley said, speaking at her Telluride Film Festival silver medallion tribute Friday night, ahead of the first public screening of her new film, Women Talking. “Kathryn Bigelow said, ‘You have to be like a dog with a bone, and everyone’s going to try to take it away from you.'”

Women Talking, a United Artists film which will also screen at the Toronto International Film Festival next week ahead of opening in theaters Dec. 2, is potent evidence Polley took that message to heart.

Click here to read the full article.

“What follows is an act of female imagination,” declares a tile card at the beginning of Women Talking. It’s an accurate description — the feature is writer-director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of a novel by Miriam Toews, centered on the female members of a Mennonite colony. But those opening words are also a taunt and a challenge: The women are sorting out their response to years of calculated sexual abuse, years in which the male leaders of their sect silenced their complaints by insisting that the horrors they experienced belonged to the realm of demons or the “wild female imagination.”

At the core of Polley’s smart, compassionate film is the belief that in movies and in life, words can be action — and for people who have been denied a voice, they can be revolutionary. The philosophical and sometimes faith-steeped bent of the...

With a title like “Women Talking,” audacious actor-turned-helmer Sarah Polley’s fourth feature makes clear that it will be one of those rare films capable of passing the Bechdel test. That barometer, for those who may not know, poses three seemingly easy-to-meet criteria: (1) The movie has to have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something other than a man. It’s astonishing how many movies fail.

Even Polley’s film, which consists of women talking for most of its 97 minutes, is a complicated exception, since most of the conversation — an urgent meeting among the wives, mothers and daughters of an ultraconservative religious colony — concerns the men. But even then, there’s no denying that “Women Talking” is unlike any film you’ve seen before, which is exactly what you’d want from the director of 2012’s astonishingly personal, format-shattering meta-documentary “Stories We Tell.” A decade later,...

For God knows how long, the women of an isolated religious community (Mennonite in everything but name) have been drugged with cow tranquilizer and raped on a regular basis during the night. The women had been told they were being violated by ghosts, demons, or even Satan himself — punishment for their own improprieties — and they believed that lie until two young girls saw one of the rapists as he scurried back to bed across the field one night. Some of the men were arrested, and the ones who weren’t have gone into the city to arrange for bail. The women of the colony, unsupervised for a short period of time, have roughly 48 hours to decide what their future will be like.

along more compassionate (matriarchal) lines, Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” never feels like it’s just 104 minutes of bonneted fundamentalists chatting in a barn, even though — with a few memorable,...