Margaret Atwood recollects MGM’s straight-to-series order in 2016 to adapt her dystopian traditional novel The Handmaid’s Story as a Hulu collection as being a contact dangerous.
“It was a bet. And the gamble paid off. Anyone approaching me earlier who mentioned we wished to make a movie about The Handmaid’s Story, I might have mentioned, ‘Who’s going to look at that?’” she instructed the second annual Hollywood Reporter Girls in Leisure Canada gala on the Ritz Carlton in Toronto on Thursday.
“When it got here out, a sure variety of folks felt it was illuminating as a result of, absolutely, the US would by no means, ever do such issues,” the acerbic Canadian creator, poet and activist mentioned as she picked up the ICON Award on the Ritz Carlton. She talked in regards to the success in adapting her 1985 dystopian novel simply as Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Story has reached the climax for its sixth and remaining season, and a small display screen therapy for her 2019 comply with up novel, The Testaments, is capturing in Toronto.
Atwood was amongst a bunch of Canadian main women celebrated at The Hollywood Reporter‘s second annual WIE Canada occasion. The all-day gathering was attended by prime homegrown producers, actors, musicians and execs like Orphan Black breakout Humberly González, Toronto Movie Fest chief programmer Anita Lee, AEG Presents exec Debra Rathwell and Cinespace Studios exec Magali Simard.
Emotional highpoints for the occasion included The Intercourse Lives of Faculty Ladies star Amrit Kaur, on stage to simply accept the Breakthrough Award, calling on her fellow Canadian girls within the room, and particularly resolution makers, to be extra feisty as they create and inform tales.
“Girls have instinct. We’re not petrified of the reality the way in which males are. We perceive the human situation. We’ve handled oppression. We don’t take no for a solution. I would like you guys to fund artwork that fuels our hearth as girls, as humanitarians and as artists” Kaur declared.
Additionally available was Shirley Halperin, co-editor-in-chief of THR, and Jeanie Pyun, deputy editorial director of THR, to introduce this 12 months’s WIE Canada Energy Listing spotlighting 45 trailblazers breaking by and constructing the way forward for movie, TV and music north of the border.
“We’re delighted to acknowledge the achievements of a various group of powerhouse girls,” Halperin mentioned as she regarded over the crowded ballroom whereas calling lots of 45 main women in attendance onto the stage to rapturous cheers and applause. WIE Canada attendees had been additionally handled to efficiency of “I’m Accomplished” by singer-songwriter Rachelle Present.
And the primary cohort of the WIE Canada Mentorship Program — Jessica Commanda, Aman Kaur Khangura, Julisa Marcel, Kipola Wakilongo, Olivia Weatherall and Dianne Wulf — additionally took to the Ritz Carlton stage alongside their instructors as they sit up for customized mentorship, workshops and networking to turbocharge their careers.
One other excessive level was Christina Jennings, founder and president of Shaftesbury, producer of the interval police procedural Murdoch Mysteries and the dog-and-cop household collection Hudson & Rex, receiving the Glass Ceiling Award. A baby of the Sixties and the Nineteen Seventies, Jennings recalled a golden age for girls’s rights as a younger girl.
“I noticed myself as no much less succesful than a person, and I by no means believed that, exterior of bodily energy, I couldn’t do something {that a} man may do,” she recalled. Jennings, sister of the late ABC Information anchor Peter Jennings, then regarded to the U.S. immediately the place girls face backlash within the office and the broader society amid the Donald Trump administration.
“Girls’s rights are being challenged and taking away the progress we made. It’s horrifying to see that variety, fairness and inclusion, these rights that we fought so strongly for, are being stripped again in the US of America,” she known as out. Additionally Thursday, Killers of the Flower Moon actress Tantoo Cardinal, who’s of Cree and Métis heritage, picked up the Fairness in Leisure Award.
She spoke of Canada’s indigenous peoples having come by the influence of Canada’s notorious residential colleges and the Sixties Scoop atrocities on the nation’s indigenous folks. “I got here from a robust folks. Our historical past will you we discovered truths in our survival of atrocities, within the marrow of the kids that survived, and touched by the spirits of people who didn’t,” Cardinal mentioned as she underscored the ability of therapeutic and self-discovery by storytelling.
And legendary trend and way of life journalist Jeanne Beker, receiving the IMPACT Award, touted with the ability to make a profession in Canada within the Eighties and Nineties, but at a time when girls weren’t as supportive of each other as they’re immediately. “There was intense competitors. I felt it, and I felt threatened by girls,” an emotional Beker recalled.
However occasions modified. “To see this unbelievable group out right here, simply radiating a lot gentle and a lot assist, it’s completely heart-swelling. Because of all of you for hanging on and being on this unbelievable journey,” Beker added.
The second annual WIE Canada summit as soon as once more introduced collectively the Canadian business throughout TV, movie and music to have fun and acknowledge the achievements of girls driving the business ahead. The occasion’s return, produced as soon as once more by Entry Canada, adopted the profitable first WIE Canada summit in 2024 attended by iconic Canadian entertainers like Lilly Singh, Nia Vardalos, Devery Jacobs, Kim Cattrall, Catherine Reitman and Jully Black.