What war does to women

Ranjita Biswas

“A great war leaves the country with three armies — an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.” — German proverb

A war also leaves behind an army of women trying to survive the trauma of war effect one would think while watching Beanpole screened at the recently concluded 25th Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF). The Russian film, which was set in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in the after-years of World War II, featured in the prestigious ‘Un Certain Regard’ section of the Cannes Film Festival.

What does a war inflict on women — left at home having to fend for themselves when their men leave for the battlefront? And those who themselves go to the war zone and return home to pick up the threads? Searingly told, Beanpole is the story of two women who became friends on the front and are now struggling to make a normal life in war-ravaged Leningrad, with its broken infrastructure, food rations and hordes of socio-economic problems. It’s a time when morality takes a backseat and hunger makes women give up their bodies in exchange for some food.

Iya is nicknamed ‘Dilda’, or ‘Beanpole’, for her unusual height. She was sent home from the front due to a concussion that still gives her strange paralytic blackouts. She lives with six-year-old Pashka, who is son of her best friend Masha, who is still out there. In one of her blackouts, she smothers Pashka to death. Masha comes back. She and Iya work in the hospital as nurses and share a tiny flat. In their suffering, in their insecurity as Masha tries to coax Iya to a bear a child, which she is unable to due to war-time injury, they try to find solace in each other.

Directed and co-written by young Kantemir Balagov (27), it is a story often left untold in Russian history, comments experts. The director said in an interview that he was inspired to make the film after reading War’s Unwomanly Face about the experience of Soviet women on the front, the debut novel (1985) of Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. A different locale, a different context, but war catches women in its terrible web too in the film The End will be Spectacular, a Kurdish film which had its world premier at the KIFF. Told in almost documentary style, it is about a resistance group of young people in the Sur district in Diybakir in northern Syria, which faced 100 days of siege by Turkish forces in 2015.

Zilan, a young woman, returns to her hometown to look for traces of her dead brother killed by the Islamic State. But she finds her town has changed. Oppressed by the Turkish Government forces, people demand political autonomy. As a consequence, they have to confront the brutal assault by the police and army. Zilan joins the resistance group, learns to use the rifle, and with some other women like her, fight side by side with the men. The so-called ‘normal’ life is denied to these battle-scarred women — a sister, a wife or a lover, while homemakers too suffer in their own way under the unending siege. But from another angle, it could be seen as empowering women too as they fight along with male compatriots. The Kurdish women are known for their tough stand on independence and their fighting ability.

According to Ersin Celik, director of the film, who was in Kolkata, “The film was shot in Kobanê, a Syrian town, close to Turkish border. The battle against ISIS was raging when we were shooting for the film.” People have asked him, how they made this “impossible” film so realistic it is.  Some of the crew who started out in the beginning were already killed by the time the shooting was completed.

The script is based on the diaries of those who died and the testimony of the survivors. 

War, in general, takes a terrible toll on women — down the ages. As World War II came to a close and the Russian Red Army advanced towards Germany, not a single woman, eight to 80 was safe from rape, say fact-finding reports.

Cinematically who can forget the 1960 film Two Women with Sophia Loren (she got the best actress award at the Oscar) by Vittorio de Sica? It is the story of mother Cesira, a widow, and her teenage daughter Rosetta, who flee Rome in 1943. Suffering from hunger, fear, betrayal, when the war ends they decide to return to Rome, happily waving at the liberator army but it is they who rape both mother and daughter. Women after all are spoils of the war, whichever way you look at it.