Director: Sarah Polley
Even though they are built tough and resilient on the inside, women lost out on many physical day-to-day duties and worked in tandem with their male counterparts to complete their tasks. Manual labour in the good old days was intensive. Mechanisation and industrialisation of the Sufferage era made work less labour-intensive. And finally, the sexual revolution of the 60s, for once, gave women, for the first time in aeons, a chance to control their fertility. All these while, parturition and child-rearing were their most significant hurdle in reaching greater heights. Maternal hormones and societal expectations prevented them from pursuing their worldly desires.
With equal education and job opportunities, the past fifty years saw the fairer sex coming to par with their male counterparts. Their journey was no walk in the park. Their presence in education, economy and politics is beyond compare. Now, there is a re-look into their combative stance to be at par with men. Some have started asking questions.
With all advances in contraceptive methods, failure is a real thing. Unfortunately, the by-product of all the sexual merriment is borne by the female gender. The maternal hormones circulating in their veins draw affection to the newborn or the soon-to-be-born. It is just simply impossible to detach oneself from this. A mother cannot just stand idle at the sound of a wailing baby. Neither can she prioritise her sleep over nursing her offspring at o'clock in the morning. Anyway, all the deferment of fertility to concentrate on career prospects in endangering childbirth at a mature age. With age, with wisdom, choosing a life partner becomes much more problematic. Single parenthood has its own problem.
This film is based on a novel by Miriam Toews referring to what happened in a Mennonite colony named Manitoba Colony in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009. The Mennonites arose from the Anabaptist movement that emerged from the Reformation era. The Anabaptists believe baptism should be voluntary at a mature age, not infancy.
The colony's 151 women and young girls were mass-sedated with cow tranquilisers and were sexually assaulted. More than seven were charged with rape, and so was the veterinarian who supplied the drug. The novel is a fictional account of what the affected women would have discussed before taking their next course of action.
This type of discussion going back and forth is what our forefathers must have had before leaving their lands and family in India, China or elsewhere. Even longer before that, when our first ancestor took his first step out of Africa. Quite recently, my daughter had to decide this before moving lock, stock and barrel to uproot from Malaysia and work under the NHS as a skilled immigrant labourer. They all must have considered the three choices - do nothing but forgive, forget and hope for the best, stay and fight, or leave.
With depleting national coffers while keeping the vote banks happy with race politics, civil service has taken a drastic deep in quality, efficacy and integrity.
[P.S. On another note... In the story, the ladies noticed that on the nights someone kept vigil, the said molestations did not occur. Gruesome assaults happened when everybody slept soundly. This reminded me of the double-slid experiments in quantum mechanics - results obtained with and without an observer, suggesting that everything is unreal.]
[P.S.S. Realising that humans need to live in a community and be herded to the correct path, which religion seems to offer, individuals prey on gullible victims to fulfil their desires.]
