Wings on Her Shoulder
1943 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Jane Marsh
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative
This archival film documents the roughly 9,000 women of the Royal Canadian Air Force's Women's Division in 1943, who trained for duties in Canada and abroad and looked ahead to a role in peacetime civil aviation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A wartime propaganda doc about women pilots sounds like the safest pick imaginable, but Marsh's refusal to sentimentalize or mythologize these 9,000 operators—just letting them exist as workers, not symbols—is quietly subversive for 1943; she's basically making an anti-heroic film disguised as patriotic duty.
Formally restrained and situated squarely in the documentary tradition of state-commissioned wartime cinema, yet Marsh's compositional discipline and the film's resistance to melodrama elevate it into something that speaks to institutional power and women's labor with a clarity that feels almost austere—the kind of archival work that rewards close viewing.
The decision to keep the camera observational and nearly invisible while the women move through training sequences—no narration until late, minimal music—makes the mundane architecture of their competence the subject itself, and that tonal choice reframes what could've been propaganda into something almost documentary-realist for its time.