Fear Us Women
2017 · 27m · USA
Directed by David Darg
Genres: documentary, war
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Fear Us Women follows Hanna Bohman, a Canadian civilian who has spent the last three years in Syria as a volunteer soldier battling ISIS.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 27-minute doc about women fighters in Kurdistan should be a foregone conclusion—worthy, predictable, forgettable—but Darg refuses the easy righteousness; instead he lets complexity breathe, which is genuinely subversive in a space crowded with moral certainty.
Darg's formal restraint—the way he composes these portraits without sentiment or editorial hand-wringing—places this squarely in the lineage of rigorous conflict documentaries; it's the kind of observational precision that demands festival conversation and rewards repeated viewing.
The decision to let long silences sit between interviews, to trust the subjects' faces rather than explanatory voiceover, is what transforms this from important-but-conventional into something that actually *breathes*—a single commitment to quiet that elevates everything around it.
Reviews
The story of these women, feared by their enemy, and fighting in the most dangerous place on earth is one of the most powerful stories I've ever encountered. This film is launching at a critical moment in the history of women's equality with an important, empowering look at the struggle and victory of a women's movement.