Why Kristen Stewart Calls Womanhood "Really Violent"

Buzz Feed

23-05-2025

Kristen Stewart is making her feature film directorial debut with The Chronology of Water, and now she's sharing the reason why she pursued this deeply personal project.
The movie is a biographical drama based on the memoir of the same name by Lidia Yuknavitch. It follows an aspiring Olympic swimmer who flees her abusive home life thanks to a Texas scholarship, but later loses the scholarship due to an addiction. She eventually finds solace through writing and her journey of self-discovery, ultimately learning how to transform trauma into art. Kristen co-wrote the screenplay with Lidia's husband, film producer Andy Mingo.
While promoting The Chronology of Water at the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival in France, Kristen sat down with Brut India to discuss this harrowing story about physical and sexual violence against women.
"Because being a woman is a really violent experience," Kristen began saying, when asked why she wanted to tell this story. "Even if you don't have the sort of extreme experience that we depict in the film, or that Lydia endured and came out of beautifully."
"To be able to take really ugly things, metabolize them, process them, and put out something that you can live with...something that actually has joy — pain and pleasure, there's a hairline fracture there. They're so tied."
"Women are — not to be dramatic, it's just these are facts — we are secrets. We are walking secrets." She then reflected on how she feels women are viewed in the world — "We wanna see you, we don't wanna hear you. Don't tell us how you feel; it makes us uncomfortable." "The thing is," Kristen continued, "we're harboring a lot of violence all of the time, and it's even in the imagery we consume."
Kristen believes women, or as she described it, "anyone who is open and bleeding, which is 50 percent of the population," will really resonate with the themes in the film because of a lot of the shared experiences women have dealt with as a collective.
"The stories we tell ourselves are very, very important, and finding your fellows, and being able to allow that story to evolve constantly, and that you can change every day, and that there's not a fixed state...that's what keeps us thriving, moving forward, everything."
"I'm not alone in that. That's how we stay alive."
I love how passionately she speaks of this project and everyone involved in it. You can watch Kristen's full Brut India interview below: