92 minutes – Documentary
Festival release date: November 29, 2019 – International Premiere, IDFA
Release date: November 7, 2019 (Toronto)
Production company: White Pine Pictures
Canadian distributor:
Margaret Atwood: A Word After A Word After A Word Is Power is the result of more than a year of. work, including exclusive access to Atwood and her late partner Graeme Gibson, as they travelled to speaking engagements around the world. Margaret was enthusiastically welcomed by crowds of all ages. The crew accompanied Atwood to the set of The Handmaid’s Tale, where she met lead actor Elisabeth Moss and Ane Crabtree, costume designer of the blood-red robes worn by protesters around the world. The film also looks into Margaret Atwood’s “backstory”, growing up in the Canadian wilderness, her early days as a poet at Harvard where she met and married a classmate, later meeting her life-partner Graeme Gibson and writing The Handmaid’s Tale. Her major works are explored and threaded through the film, revealing the personal and societal factors that inform her stories. Stories are shared by her closest friends and family and, of course, directly by Atwood herself. Finally, the filmmakers were there as she completed the final chapters of her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale – a rare glimpse into the writer’s practice, as she wrote on planes, boats and on the road.
NOTE: Margaret Atwood’s Poetry and Prose is read by Tatiana Maslany.
NOTE: Developed and Produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada,
Margaret Atwood: A Word After A Word After A Word Is Power has been edited to various lengths: 78, 52 and 44 minutes.
Nancy Lang
Peter Raymont
Peter Pearson
Steve Ord
Stephen Paniccia
Nancy Lang
Peter Raymont
John Westheuser
Cathy Gulkin
Kathryn Lyons
Margaret Atwood
Graeme Gibson
Ane Crabtree
Elisabeth Moss
Sarah Polley
Tatiana Maslany
Charles Pachter
Adrienne Clarkson
Susan Swan
Herself
Himself
Herself
Herself
Herself
Herself
Himself
Herself
Herself
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First published as Northernstars.net February 1, 1998
ISSN 2563 4895