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.

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NOMINATED, BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT, 2024 New Bedford Film Festival

NOMINATED, BEST ORIGINAL SCORE, 2024 New Bedford Film Festival

NOMINATED, BEST ORIGINAL SONG, 2024 New Bedford Film Festival

A FILM BY KAREN TURNER'S MARCH 8 PRODUCTIONS

EDITED AND PRODUCED WITH MICHAEL T. BARRY JR., MT BARRY PRODUCTIONS

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WINNER, BEST SHORT FILM, 2023 PRINCE GEORGE'S FILM FESTIVAL

WINNER, BEST SHORT FEATURE, 2024 NYACK FILM FESTIVAL

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​“‘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.”

-Cynthia Enloe, author of Twelve Feminist Lessons of War

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