Holy Cross Professor's Film Hits the Big Screen at an International Film Festival

WORCESTER, Mass. – A documentary film titled, Hidden Warriors: Women on the Ho Chi Minh Trail directed by Karen Turner, professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross, has been selected for the 9th Annual Women's International Film Festival, a project of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). The high profile festival titled, Through Women's Eyes, showcases films by women directors from around the world. It will take place February 1-2, 2008 in Sarasota, Fla.

Produced by Turner and Phan Thanh Hao, a Vietnamese journalist, they began working on Hidden Warriors in 2000 and finished in 2005, representing the first joint effort by an American and Vietnamese team. In 2006, Turner spent a semester in Hanoi, Vietnam on a Fulbright Grant, where she shot footage that will be used as an epilogue for the festival. The documentary was shot in several stages, all taking place in Hanoi, with Vietnamese cameramen and U.S. cinematographers.

“The film tells the story of the thousands of young women who volunteered to support North Vietnam's regular army after 1965 when the U.S. intensified its air war,” explains Turner. “These women left their homes during their teens and early twenties, forgoing marriage and education, to defend the most critical sites along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”

The 46-minute film shows archival footage from Hanoi, never before shown in the U.S. It documents the daily lives and struggles of these women who took on the work of their male comrades, displaying visually that women can stand up as well as men under the most violent conditions.

“Interviews filmed in Hanoi with members of one troop of volunteer youth reveal why women left home to fight, how they managed leadership roles, the respect they earned from male counterparts, and the disappointments of their lives in the post-war era,” explains Turner. “Hidden Warriors not only adds an important and new dimension to a war story told in the past mainly through male views, but also contributes important insight to questions about the role of women in war.”

The film has been a useful teaching tool, and has been shown in Hanoi and in over 30 venues in the U.S.

The idea for the film came from a book Turner co-wrote with Hao, titled, Even the Women Must Fight:  Memories of War from North Vietnam (Wiley New York, 1998). After the book was published, several documentary filmmakers called to get permission to use the book as a basis for a film. But, Turner and Hao decided that they did not want to lose control of the story or the interviews with the group of veterans, and decided to produce the film themselves.

“We knew that these were ordinary people who did not know how to deal with the media, especially from the U.S., and would probably not talk as openly as they did with a small crew that they knew, and a Vietnamese cameraman,” says Turner.

Turner, a member of Holy Cross faculty since 1987, is a trained scholar of classical Chinese law and has written about law in China in a comparative context. She is now working with a team at Stanford University to compare the Chinese and Roman empires. Turner was instrumental in the development of the Asian Studies program at the College, and is the recipient of several academic awards and honors, including being named the Rev. John E. Brooks, S.J., Professor of Humanities (2002-2005).

“I went to Vietnam with my husband, Thomas Gottschang, professor of economics at Holy Cross and a Vietnam vet, in 1993 when he taught economics at Hanoi National University,” says Turner. “I heard these stories of women fighters for the first time in Hanoi during that visit and they changed my life. I continued to work on two fronts, one in the China field, and the other in the history of women and war, especially in Vietnam.”

Turner says her students have been a major force in the film. One of them did a voiceover for the film and her classes have watched and commented on it as it has progressed.

“The insights of my students, who are far savvier about film than I am, have been very helpful and I have always kept them in mind as my imaginary audience and that has helped with the focus of the work.”

She has also had overwhelming support form the administration and her colleagues at Holy Cross.

Established in 1976, UNIFEM is the women's fund at the United Nations, completely supported by voluntary donations. Their mission is to advance women's human rights, focusing on activities to reduce women's poverty and exclusion, stopping violence against women, ending the spread of HIV/AIDS among women and girls, and supporting women's leadership in governance and post-conflict reconstruction.

All proceeds from the 2008 Through Women's Eyes film festival goes to the Safe Cities Program to stop violence against women in Latin America.

For more information or tickets please visit www.ThroughWomensEyes.com.