“Toughness doesn’t have to be forceful. It can be gentle.” Siila Watt-Cloutier says this early in the film, and it lands softly, almost like an aside. Not long after, Sharon Farmer comes in with a counterpoint, “Challenge me if you wish.” Between those two impulses—gentleness and defiance—”Tough Old Broads” settles into its rhythm. Strength, the film suggests, isn’t one thing. It shifts, it adapts, and sometimes it raises its voice. But then again, writer-director Stacey Tenenbaum argues, sometimes it doesn’t need to.
Tenenbaum follows three women whose names carry weight in very different spaces: Kathrine Switzer, who ran the Boston Marathon when women weren’t allowed to; Watt-Cloutier, who turned lived Inuit experience into global climate advocacy; and Farmer, a photographer and activist who helped push institutions to make room for voices long kept out. The film traces where they’ve been, but it doesn’t treat those milestones as endpoints. These lives haven’t been boxed up and archived. Instead, they’re still in motion.
The [Unseen] Cost of Being First
What binds the three women isn’t just that they were first. It’s what it took to get there. Tenenbaum keeps returning to a simple but unsettling idea: these women weren’t handed certainty. They fought for the chance to even be considered. Opportunity, in their case, wasn’t a doorway waiting to be opened. It was something they had to carve out, often against systems that resisted their very presence.
The documentary moves between archival footage and present-day moments with a light touch, allowing each story to breathe without over-structuring the connections. Most of the time, the throughline holds. You feel how these lives, separated by geography and discipline, mirror one another in quieter ways—through persistence, through refusal, through the decision to keep showing up long after the initial breakthrough.
There are moments, though, when the stitching becomes visible. The transitions between subjects don’t always land as smoothly as the film intends, and you can sense a few rough edges in how the narratives are woven together. A sharper editorial hand might have deepened the interplay between these stories, pushed them into more revealing conversation with one another.
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‘Tough Old Broads’: Transforming a Dismissive Remark Into an Ode to Women’s Strength
Still, the film’s core idea carries it forward. And a lot of that comes down to what it’s doing with the title itself. “Tough Old Broads” takes a phrase that’s been used to dismiss, to reduce, to wave women off—and turns it inside out. “Tough,” “old,” “broads”: each word, in isolation, carries a history of condescension. Here, they’re reassembled into something sturdier, even affectionate. Not softened, exactly, but redefined on the women’s own terms.
And the film never lets that redefinition drift away. It keeps returning to the body, to presence, to the act of continuing. Switzer, still running, becomes the clearest image of that. Near the end of the film, she leaves behind a simple way of thinking about things that women today can follow: be present, be patient, be persistent. Sure, there’s nothing grand about it, but it’s one hell of a way forward.
With the film, Tenenbaum turns a once-derogatory label into a portrait of quiet strength, persistence, and lived resistance. At just under 90 minutes, the documentary moves with an easy rhythm. It doesn’t overextend itself, and it rarely lags. If anything, it leaves you wanting a little more friction, a little more excavation beneath the already compelling surface. But even within its modest scope, it makes a clear, timely case.
Because what “Tough Old Broads” ultimately understands is this: Resilience doesn’t always look the part. Sometimes it looks like endurance. Sometimes it looks like humor. And sometimes, it looks like three women who refused to disappear, even when the world expected them to.
Stacey Tenenbaum’s “Tough Old Broads” had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) on February 10, 2026. The festival ran from February 4 to February 14, 2026. Follow us for more coverage.
