women soldiers
Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation is simultaneously funny, serious, sentimental, sarcastic, slapstick, and totally unique.
Megan Leavey’s delivers a good story, almost making up for its lack of focus and unwillingness to commit to its main storyline.
After Fire focuses on a female veteran named Valerie Sullivan, discussing how women in the military deal with trauma after coming home from war.
In part one of ‘Gender at War’, we looked at several films which have changed the perception of women in war. Traditionally, women have been pushed to the side – presented as Madonnas (wives, mothers or whores) with no space for them in the gritty action. The increased presence of women as soldiers in war films (instead of passive grieving objects) has forced other questions about the act of war to arise.
We have plenty of excellent and notable films about women in wartime, but their narratives are all too familiar. Often the female protagonist is waiting for the return of her husband or lover, or she is grieving at sending her sons off to war (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Private Peaceful). Sometimes, the war itself exploits and manipulates the nature of our protagonists leading them to betray their country (Rome Open City, to name but one).