Pieces of a Woman is a 2020 drama film directed by Kornél Mundruczó, from a screenplay by Kata Weber. It stars Vanessa Kirby, Shia LaBeouf, Molly Parker, Sarah Snook, Iliza Shlesinger, Benny Safdie, Jimmie Fails, and Ellen Burstyn. Martin Scorsese serves as an executive producer.
The film is directly related to Mundruczo and Weber's stageplay, Pieces of a Woman, performed by the artistic ensemble of TR Warszawa (Poland). The stage performance premiered in December 2018. It had its world premiere on September 4, 2020, at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, where Kirby won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. The film will be released in select theaters on December 30, 2020, before being released digitally by Netflix on January 7, 2021
In October 2019, it was announced Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf had joined the cast of the film, with Kornél Mundruczo directing from a screenplay by Kata Weber. Sam Levinson will serve as an executive producer on the film. In December 2019, Jimmie Fails, Ellen Burstyn, Molly Parker, and Iliza Shlesinger joined the cast of the film. In January 2020, Sarah Snook and Benny Safdie joined the cast of the film. Howard Shore composed the film's score. Principal photography began in December 2019 around Montreal.
Martha and Sean Carson are a Boston couple on the verge of parenthood whose lives change irrevocably during a home birth at the hands of a flustered midwife, who faces charges of criminal negligence. Thus begins a year-long odyssey for Martha, who must navigate her grief while working through fractious relationships with her husband and her domineering mother, along with the publicly vilified midwife whom she must face in court.
“Pieces of a Woman,” the English-language debut of director Kornél Mundruczo and written with his wife Kata Weber, stunned the fall festival circuit earlier this year, playing at Venice and Toronto. Starring Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf as a couple grappling with the unimaginable and with stellar supporting turns from the likes of Ellen Burstyn and Sarah Snook, the drama launches on Netflix beginning January 7, 2021.
Martin Scorsese executive-produces this gritty and hard-edged examination of loss centered on Martha (Kirby) and Sean (LaBeouf), a Boston couple reeling after a home birth ends in tragedy. Martha spirals into a messy, yearlong odyssey of grief, often pained discovery while also haunted by memories of what went wrong with the now publicly vilified midwife (Molly Parker), who she must face in court.
Martha also has to answer to her domineering mother, played enormously by Burstyn in another career-topping turn of many. Sean, meanwhile, goes on his own journey inward and out of control as the pair try to pick up the pieces, even as they are rarely moving in the same direction.
During a recent virtual post-screening Q&A hosted by Netflix, Kirby shared how important the film’s ambitious 23-minute opening sequence was to her process of getting into character. It’s a harrowing opening that drops us squarely into their dynamic.
Kirby confessed to feeling more scared by the possibility of doing “a birth that was edited and chopped up because, in a way, you’d have to get yourself into different stages of labor while cutting, going for a break, having lunch, or whatever.” The continuous take, Kirby said, aided in their “intention to make it as authentic as possible.”
Kirby said the team was determined to show “birth in all its glory, in its difficulty, and its pain, and its horror and its majesty.” She added, “I knew that I had to understand every minute of what labor was like,” eventually shadowing an obstetrician in a labor ward and even watching a full birth during the course of her preparation.
The team shot the scene during the film’s first two days on set, with two takes a day. “We just had no idea if it was going to work, and we just came together as a little tribe and went for it,” Kirby said. “It was actually exhilarating. It was the best film experience of my life.”
The actress also spoke to a number of women who lost babies similarly. “When I started the process of trying to get inside Martha and, really, the majority of the film is post-that trauma, I knew that I had experienced that particular kind of loss,” she said. “I managed to find some really brave women who really wanted to share their experiences.
The more I spoke to them, the more I found how difficult society finds [it] to talk about it. A lot of the women I spoke to felt as if their bodies had failed in some way, or they had failed their child, so [they feel] the guilt that comes with that, as well as the self-blame.”
Kirby added that one of the women she spoke to described their grieving process as “the loneliest feeling in the whole world, and you feel so isolated,” a feeling that permeates much of Kirby’s work as Martha in the film.
Netflix will release “Pieces of a Woman” in select theaters on Wednesday, December 30 before the streaming premiere on Thursday, January 7
Pieces of a Woman Cast
- Vanessa Kirby as Martha Weiss
- Shia LaBeouf as Sean Carson
- Ellen Burstyn as Elizabeth Weiss
- Molly Parker as Eve Woodward
- Sarah Snook as Suzanne
- Iliza Shlesinger as Anita Weiss
- Benny Safdie as Chris
- Jimmie Fails as Max
- Domenic Di Rosa as Dr. Ron
Pieces of a Woman Release Date
The film had its world premiere at the 77th Venice International Film Festival in the official competition on September 4, 2020. Shortly after, Netflix acquired worldwide distribution rights to the film. It also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in late September 2020.
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