Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The artwork “Russian Rocket” by Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova is very simple: an image of a Russian ballistic missile, printed on to transparent stickers. Rather than hang in a museum, those stickers have fanned out on to train and plane windows around the world to plague skies, as Ukraine’s have been since 2022.The work features early in Margy Kinmonth’s absorbing documentary War Paint: Women at War. The film is a survey of women war artists that speaks with clarity and insight to all points of that equation: women, art, and war, which, as per “Russian Rocket”, is seen to follow humanity everywhere. Kadyrova is just one among many notable subjects. A handful may already be familiar. Take Lee Miller, the American photographer whose images of the second world war are now famous enough that she became the subject of a recent biopic, Lee, starring Kate Winslet. Yet even her reputation was only made after her death, with the discovery of a trove of her work. The lot of women war artists, Kinmonth suggests, has long been “archives and attics”.One priority, then, is simply to spotlight the overlooked. But the film is always deftly broadening its remit. The definition of war artist itself is put subtly in play. In the UK, Laura Knight’s rousing 1943 portrait of munitions worker Ruby Loftus eventually segues to “War Machine”, Cornelia Parker’s 2015 film of the factory that makes poppies for Remembrance Day. Amid the grinding Sudanese civil war, artist Assil Diab creates spray-paint public tributes to ordinary victims of the conflict, a street art counterpart to Maya Lin’s vast, black granite Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. But the film also deals with how women live through war. That can be with a weapon in their hand. Or, with cruel frequency, it means being subjected to sexual violence. In Kinmonth’s war-art panorama, we see how old that ugly story is. There in the Bayeux Tapestry, she tells us, are scenes of rape — under the arrows that flew 1,000 years before Zhanna Kadyrova’s Russian rockets.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from March 28
