And We Knew How to Dance: Women in World War I
1993 · 55m · Canada
Directed by Maureen Judge
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, tender
Twelve Canadian women aged eighty-six to one hundred one recall munitions and farm work during the First World War. Wartime labour reshaped expectations for women afterward.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a straight oral history doc about grandmothers in WWI—exactly the kind of worthy, consensus-friendly project that makes me want to look away, except Judge actually refuses the sentimental nostalgia trap and lets these women's contradictions breathe, which is quietly radical.
A formally precise act of archival consciousness: Judge positions these octogenarian voices within a deliberate lineage of feminist documentary practice, using restraint and temporal depth to ask how labour reshapes identity across decades—this is the kind of film that earns its 55 minutes through rigorous editorial thinking.
The singular move here is Judge's decision to let silences and hesitations do the emotional work rather than underscore them; the performances emerge not from polish but from the camera's patience with contradiction and half-remembered detail, which transforms what could be rote testimony into something genuinely alive.