North Country (2005)

Image credit: North Country: Richard Foreman

THERON AND HARRELSON

After the surprise success of 2003's indie hit Whale Rider — the heartwarming story of a plucky Maori girl's rite of passage to tribal leadership — New Zealand filmmaker Niki Caro says she suddenly found herself the go-to director for every ''small-girl-and-large-mammal film'' Hollywood had to offer. But she wasn't interested in making, say, Hippo Rider, so when this provocative, hot-button drama inspired by a landmark 1984 sexual harassment case came her way, she jumped on it.

Charlize Theron stars as Josey Aimes, a struggling single mother who rouses her female co-workers to take a stand against unfair treatment and abuse at a mining company; Woody Harrelson plays the lawyer who takes on her class action suit. As an outsider filming in Minnesota, where the real-life case of Jenson v. Eveleth Mines took place, Caro faced skepticism from some locals who were not eager to reopen old wounds. ''They were anxious,'' she says. ''It's a part of their recent history they're not proud of.'' Still, though she comes from a country that's ''pretty well run by women,'' Caro had no interest in making a simple male-bashing polemic. ''The most important thing to me is that the audience not come away with an idea that men are evil and women are good,'' she says, ''because I know that not to be the case.''