Women Talking film sparks conversation about women and justice
From left: Lincoln Alexander School of Law student Sabrina Khela, director Sarah Polley, author Miriam Towes and Lincoln Alexander School of Law professor Jennifer Orange at TIFF before their panel event. Photo by Jae Yang
During the Fall 2022 semester, while she was teaching a course on alternative dispute resolution (ADR), Lincoln Alexander School of Law professor Jennifer Orange went to see the film Women Talking. As she sat in the theatre, she noticed the characters–women and girls living in a remote Mennonite colony–using the same ADR processes and techniques that she taught to her students.
"I thought Miriam Toews had taken a class on alternative dispute resolution because her book really blew me away,” said professor Orange. "It struck me that the book and film adaptation of Women Talking could help us think about how we can reconstruct ADR practices to make them better for everyone and in particular for women and women who are victims and survivors of sexual violence."
Professor Orange enlisted the help of third-year law student and research assistant Sabrina Khela to pursue the idea. Together, they analyzed the novel, screenplay and film to demonstrate how the dispute resolution processes in Women Talking provide a framework for restructuring ADR to include feminist-oriented practices that address the harms of gender inequality.
The research culminated in the publication of a legal research paper (external link) and a panel event featuring Women Talking author Miriam Toews and Sarah Polley, who received an Academy Award for the adapted screenplay and directed the film.
“As lawyers and legal scholars, we can learn so much from interdisciplinary dialogue,” said professor Orange. “Miriam created the dispute resolution processes in the novel and Sarah interpreted them in a way that visualized the women’s strength. We were so fortunate that they agreed to join us. They were extremely generous with their time and, as expected, shared perspectives that are not at the front of mind for legal scholars.”
The event, hosted by the Lincoln Alexander School of Law, took place at the TIFF Lightbox on February 27, 2025. The four women engaged the audience of Lincoln Alexander Law students, alumni, faculty, staff and supporters in a conversation about autonomy, freedom and justice for women.
“Working on this project for the past two years has been the highlight of not only my journey in law school but of my entire academic career,” said Khela. “My time at TMU and Lincoln Law has been such an influential experience because it helped establish my career as a junior legal scholar, and it set the stage for my future career as a litigator, legal scholar, and advocate for women’s rights.”
The female imagination
Described as an imagined response to real events, Women Talking tells the story of a colony of women and girls who experience sexual assault at the hands of the men in their colony. Before the men are discovered, the assaults are blamed on ghosts, demons or the “wild female imagination.”
The female imagination took centre stage at the panel event where professor Orange, Khela, Toews and Polley discussed how the female imagination is used in art and law.
Khela explained that women’s credibility is often questioned in sexual assault cases. This can retraumatize survivors and victims and discourage women from reporting the assaults.
At the same time, the female imagination can be powerful, with Toews pointing out that the novel’s characters used their imagination to imagine a different, and completely unknown, future for themselves.
This served as a reminder to use imagination in legal practice to bring about change because “it’s so easy for us to follow what’s happened before,” said professor Orange. She also spoke about the idea of precedents and how women were not in the room when the majority of legal precedents were created. This is something she hopes to change with her research.
The four women also discussed how art can inform feminist legal practices, especially when it comes to empathy and understanding other perspectives.
“I feel like that’s where the arts come in,” said Polley. “It’s this idea of really inhabiting a kind of empathy where you’re not just able to make the argument for the other side, you can actually feel what it would be like in an experiential way. I feel like there’s almost a necessary dialogue between the arts and law…artists and people in law have a lot to learn from each other.”
ADR practices in Women Talking
In Women Talking, the women and girls of the colony have two days to decide how to respond to the sexual assaults they’ve experienced: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave.
Throughout the story, the characters engage in several ADR practices to decide on the resolution, which professor Orange and Khela analyze in their research paper. The ADR practices include voting, a variation of the wise-man procedure and making a pros and cons list for each resolution.
The wise-man procedure typically sees a senior person selected to represent their company or party on each side of the negotiation. In Women Talking, one family represents the “stay and fight” resolution while another family represents the “leave” resolution. Three women from each family are included in the wise-woman discussion and negotiation.
“To create the story, I knew I couldn’t have every voice from the colony. It would be a mess to attempt to write something like that so I needed to pare that down,” said Toews, who was not familiar with ADR when she was writing the novel.
While choosing three women–a grandmother, a mother and a teenage daughter–to represent each side of the decision was a literary choice, professor Orange and Khela explored how it could inform a more women-friendly version of the ADR procedure. In their paper they explain that intergenerational thinking is not regularly applied to dispute resolution but it is helpful in addressing the harms that come from gender-based violence.
Another insight Khela shared during the panel conversation was how the story of Women Talking adds humanity to the process of ADR and mediation. “We don’t have those little moments of humanity,” said Khela referring to film scenes showing hair braiding during negotiations and the women taking a break for tea.
“I think if the legal process did have that, it would remind all parties in the room that we’re all human and perhaps we’re all working toward a shared goal. This relates to one of the proposals we make in our paper, the importance of ritual and prioritizing care of the parties. Our hope is that legal processes can actually get there,” Khela said.
Looking to the future
Professor Orange and Khela include seven proposals for a feminist approach to ADR in their research paper.
In addition to prioritizing care, they write that a feminist ADR practice prioritizes relationships and relationship-building, is centred on finding connection, relies on multiple dispute resolution processes, considers the lived experiences and interests of survivors/victims, is critical and dialogical and is future oriented.
While their list of proposals is not exhaustive, they serve as a starting point for further research and discussion.
Professor Orange says that the paper is just the beginning and that in the future she would like to hold a workshop on imagining feminist ADR that would help broaden the knowledge base with people who have different dispute resolution backgrounds.
After Khela graduates this spring, she will article at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice as a Judicial Law Clerk. She also plans to pursue a career as a litigator and legal scholar focused on public service, criminal law, constitutional law, human rights law and women’s rights.
The panel event, which was hosted in collaboration with TIFF and with support from Babin Bessner Spry LLP and Torys LLP, took place just days after professor Jennifer Orange and Lincoln Alexander School of Law student Sabrina Khela published their research paper. Read Women Talking: An Alchemy for Feminist Alternative Dispute Resolution (external link) in the Journal of Law and Equality.
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