Even the Women Must Fight

This new documentary, Even the Women Must Fight, brings to film for the first time the voices of Vietnamese women who took up arms to support Ho Chi Minh’s armies after the US bombed their northern villages. These women’s narratives of war and homecoming and the rare historical footage from Northern Vietnamese combat photographers that documents their
courage and competence under fire, challenge stereotypes of Vietnamese women as passive victims in the image of Miss Saigon.

The old Vietnamese proverb: “When the enemy comes close to home, even the women must fight,” speaks to a long history of women who took up arms to defend their nation against
outside invaders. Inspired by this tradition of martial women, propelled out of their homes after the US bombed their northern villages in 1965, thousands of teenage girls volunteered to
join Ho Chi Minh’s armies. Hidden in the dense jungles that sheltered the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the war, invisible to the US pilots whose lethal weapons wrought death and destruction,
they were then erased from histories after the war. Phan Thanh Hao, a Hanoi based writer and translator, and Karen Turner, a US based historian and filmmaker, worked with the veterans of
one company of volunteer youth to secure interviews that form the basis of this film. When Vietnamese women speak, a contested, male dominated, war story changes forever.

“‘Even the Women Must Fight’ is an eye-opening film for right now. It’s today, in the midst of myriad wars, that we each need to draw and refine lessons about war by listening intently to Vietnamese women about their wars - and their post-wars. Viewing this moving film made me think and rethink women’s experiences of war and its long, gendered aftermath.”