War Paint: Women at War Review – Art & Conflict

War Paint: Women at War is a powerful commentary on women’s roles in conflict, showing how art offers resilience, courage, and hope.

War Paint: Women at War is the third film in a trilogy by filmmaker Margy Kinmonth that documents artistic reactions to conflict. Kinmonth travels the world meeting and interviewing artists that are either exploring current conflicts that immediately affect them or have used their artistic ability to document wars from the past. 

Kinmonth meets Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova, who creates sculpture, photography, video and site-specific projects using objects found on the battlefields. For example, Kadyrova’s 2024-piece “Instrument” is a working pipe organ created from fragments of fired Russian shells from the frontlines of the current Russian/Ukraine War. When the work is exhibited it allows for an act of musical creation from the devices of destruction. This is a recurrent idea seen in the artworks featured in the film.

Kinmonth meets with British artist Linda Kitson, who was assigned official War Artist of the Falklands War of 1982. Her drawings and sketches from that era depict the chaos of the battlefield in a series that was created right in the arena of conflict. The rushed strokes of pen and paint capture the chaotic nature, or as Kitson comments herself, a ‘running story’ of the battles she was immersed in.

Kinmonth also explores the historical depictions of war by women artists during the Second World War. The photographs of American photojournalist Lee Miller, who was stationed in the United Kingdom as Vogue magazine’s official war photographer during the Blitz, depict life on the homefront and feature predominantly women who remained and kept the ammunition factories running to feed the war machine abroad and defend their towns and cities at home. The narratives of the Second World War have often praised male sacrifice, while burying women’s roles in how the war was won.  

New York based Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat works are based in photography and film and explores women’s roles within conflict, juxtaposing femininity and masculinity. Her work features women holding guns and other weapons towards the camera in menacing stances. While able to work from her space in New York, Neshat’s art allows for a commentary of war and conflict within a nation that has for most of its existence silenced and shunned women’s voices, and restricted women’s rights.  

This lack of interpretation of war from women’s perspectives is what lies at the heart of War Paint: Women at War. Each artist is asked what women are able to see in the conflict zone that men cannot. The answers vary, but a common thread appears. Women often bear witness to the devastating results of conflict. The trauma inflicted on those engaged in combat, on families, on communities, and on wider society. They are often left to pick up the pieces long after the battles are over. While the male fighters and instigators of war move on to the next battlefield or plan the next conquest far away from the battle zone, it is the women who are tasked, often without guidance or direction, with the rebuilding of not just the physical spaces, but the healing of mental scars. 

This act of rebuilding is represented by the artists profiled in the film. They see the destructive act of war as an opportunity to create something that conveys the atrocities of conflict but allows for reconciliation to those that engage with their works. 

War Paint: Women at War features artists and artworks that engage with the horrors and tragedies of war. Though powerful in their grim depictions, it is clear that these works also radiate with a sense of hope. From the smiling female factory workers seen in the photographs of Lee Miller to the murals by artist Eythar Gubara of those killed in the Sudanese Civil War, art is used as a tool of resistance to the idea of war full stop, but also to the drudgery of wartime and to raise the idea that hope for another world exists. 

In our current age of renewed conflicts and brewing international animosity, it is essential that our investment in art and creativity is also renewed. Art offers a hiding place from the world, be it in film, photographs, or paintings. But art comes from and reacts to the world around us. When war and conflict emerge, it is fundamental that artists in society document this for future preservation. There are lessons to be learnt in art that could change the course of the future.

And there are lessons to be learned from War Paint: Women at War. Ultimately, and most importantly, the film is a document of women’s voices on the subject of war and atrocities, and the power of art to present and narrate the conditions of war and to allow for the healing of internal wounds.   

War Paint: Women at War will be released in UK & Irish cinemas on March 28, 2025.

Header credit: A Balloon Site Coventry by Dame Laura Knight, featured in War Paint: Women at War (Imperial War Museums / Conic)