Hulu has picked up U.S. rights to Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word Is Power, the feature documentary about the Canadian literary star and The Handmaid’s Tale author.
The film, from directors Nancy Lang and Peter Raymont, follows Atwood and her late partner Graeme Gibson to events around the world, and has interviews with The Handmaid’s Tale star Elisabeth Moss, Sarah Polley, Volker Schlöndorf and others, while Tatiana Maslany reads Atwood’s poetry and prose.
Hulu said the Atwood documentary will start streaming Nov. 19.
The film’s producer, White Pine Pictures, added Wednesday that A Word After a Word has been sold to eight other foreign territories besides Hulu, including ARTE in France and Germany, Sky in the U.K. and HBO for Central Europe, on top of sales to Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Finland and Sweden.
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Hulu’s TV adaptation Handmaid’s Tale only grew Atwood’s profile after earlier novels like The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Alias Grace, the MaddAddam Trilogy and the Angel Catbird graphic novels. Atwood’s latest novel The Testaments, the follow-up to Handmaid’s Tale, split the prestigious Booker Prize with British author Bernardine Evaristo earlier this week.
MGM and Hulu earlier announced they will develop The Testaments as a follow-up to Handmaid’s Tale for the screen. Atwood, who won the Booker in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, like The Handmaid’s Tale set The Testaments in Gilead, a theocratic republic taken root in the U.S., where young women are forced to bear children for powerful men.
Lang and Raymont’s Atwood doc, produced in association with CBC Docs and the Documentary Channel, will have its international premiere Nov. 23 at the IDFA festival in Amsterdam after debuting Nov. 7 at Bell Lightbox in Toronto.
