Women Are Warriors
1942 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Jane Marsh
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A Second World War film surveys women's expanding roles on the war fronts: ferrying planes and operating anti-aircraft guns in England, fighting and serving as medical staff in Russia, and joining auxiliaries and factory work in Canada.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a 1942 NFB propaganda piece, so on paper it's the last thing I'd touch—but Marsh does something genuinely strange here, letting the women's labor speak for itself without the expected patriotic voiceover manipulation, which almost accidentally becomes subversive.
A formally restrained wartime documentary that refuses sentimentality while constructing a precise historical argument across three theaters of war; the editing discipline—cross-cutting labor and combat without melodrama—places it in direct conversation with the best of social documentary tradition.
The real move is how Marsh cuts between the women's hands at work—ferrying, firing, assembling—and lets that rhythm become the film's emotional language rather than relying on interviews or musical swells; it's maximum impact from the decision to trust the work itself.