Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Some family histories were talked about when Margy Kinmonth was growing up. Others were not. For instance, even when the British filmmaker was a child in the 1960s, she knew that her grandfather John Henry Godfrey, head of British naval intelligence during the second world war, had been the model for M, James Bond’s boss in the Ian Fleming novels. But it would be another decade before she learnt the whole truth about her family. It emerged that her mother, Kathleen Godfrey, had been a wartime codebreaker at the now famous Bletchley Park. “It was the 1970s by the time anything about Bletchley came out,” she says on a cold afternoon in London. “So that was the first I knew about it either.” It is tempting to draw a line from A to B. On the one hand, we have Kinmonth’s belated discovery of her mother’s time at Bletchley, which was 75 per cent staffed by women. At the other, there is her latest film, the compelling War Paint: Women At War, a documentary panorama of female artists. Like Bletchley — held back from public knowledge for a quarter century — it too can feel like a secret history.But history is ongoing, and Kinmonth, 71, chipper and dynamic, leans towards the present tense. The film opens in Ukraine with the artist Zhanna Kadyrova, whose recent work includes a musical organ built from spent Russian ballistic missile casings. “Zhanna has this incredible inventiveness — and commitment,” she says. Money made selling Kadyrova’s art is channelled back into, for example, repurposing Ukrainian jeeps as ambulances.What is it women see in war that men don’t? A lot of the time, it’s the aftermathThe film often speaks to live conflicts: the grinding Sudanese civil war, the bombing of Gaza. Yet if War Paint can feel like reportage, Kinmonth also made it with an eye for something more profound. “I wanted to show the way art can get to those places journalism can’t,” she says. And on screen, the likes of Kadyrova are part of a continuing narrative. For Kinmonth, inspiration came from her previous film, Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War, a documentary about the British second world war artist whose own legacy was long neglected. Released in post-pandemic 2022, it proved an unexpected box office success (making almost £370,000 in UK cinemas).It also left Kinmonth knowing where to go next. Her starting point for the new film was the parallel but much bigger story of overlooked women war artists. Think of American photographer Lee Miller, now celebrated for her images of second world war London and Europe. (Lee, a biopic starring Kate Winslet, was released last year.) But even she was all but forgotten until a vast trove of pictures was found at her Sussex farmhouse after her death in 1977. Miller embodied the way women’s war art often ended up lost in what Kinmonth calls “archives and attics”. A still starker example is interviewee Linda Kitson. As Britain’s war artist during the 1982 Falklands war, she followed troops into battle — the first woman artist ever officially to do so — producing countless stark, eye-witness drawings under fire. “A frontline survivor,” Kinmonth says. “Never got a damehood or a CBE. And really unfairly disregarded.”Yet once Kinmonth started making the film, the remit widened. Beyond providing a spotlight, she also asks her subjects a recurring question: what is it women see in war that men don’t? Today, Kinmonth herself suggests one answer. “A lot of the time, it’s the aftermath.” That’s a darkness at the heart of the film. How, for many women, a war can never really be overEditing the film, she kept circling back to photographs taken by Nina Berman after the Vietnam war of what were then called “Amerasian” children. Often born of rape, the lives of those children and their mothers served to disprove a basic tenet of history: that wars end on a given date of truce or surrender. “That’s a darkness at the heart of the film,” Kinmonth says. “How, for many women, a war can never really be over.”Tragically, it is an old story. War Paint finds visual references to rape in the Bayeux Tapestry: (“Stitched by nuns,” Kinmonth points out.) It is also a story that puts the film at the very centre of the geopolitical moment, amid pressure to bring formal peace to Ukraine, where Russian troops are widely reported to have engaged in organised sexual violence. “If there are going to be conversations about defence spending,” Kinmonth says, “let’s also talk about rape in war.” She is looking forward to showing the film next month at Washington DC’s National Museum of Women in the Arts. “A very good place to screen it.”The event will have additional weight for Kinmonth. While in DC to film last year, she was physically attacked by a man on a darkened street. “It was the first time it had ever happened to me — making this of all films.” She was able to fight the assailant off. But the episode has changed her, she says. “I realised my first instinct was to blame myself for walking down that particular street.” She has since taken up self defence.Kinmonth does also find room in War Paint for her mother, Kathleen Godfrey. But despite the family connection to spycraft, Kinmouth went to art school, discovering there that she wanted to make films. By the 1990s, she was a successful maker of TV documentaries on the arts. (Making the Bafta-winning series Naked Hollywood, she was once ejected from the Oscars by the LAPD after straying into the wrong area backstage.) Later, a period directing staple British TV dramas such as Casualty was illuminating. “At the time it was brilliant because I had young children. But it made me realise I wanted my signature on things, creatively. What’s the point otherwise?”Returning to documentary, she made well-regarded studies of haute couture and, in particular, Russian culture. There were portraits of St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre, and the Hermitage Museum. Filming in Russia during the 2000s and early 2010s, Kinmonth found a museum world in which access was sometimes best secured with a bag of cash. “I found it fascinating. Now it disgusts me. They’ve all carried on doing Putin’s work.”Amid the praise for her film on Ravilious, she declined an invitation to screen it at the Moscow International Film Festival. “It’s sad — at one point there would have been such prestige in that.” Still, in the UK, the movie became a personal landmark. At a time when feature documentary seemed to have been swallowed whole by Netflix, Kinmonth found herself with a true sleeper hit — and a cinema career. “It went from nobody wanting it to 500 UK cinemas asking to screen it. I hadn’t realised there were 500 UK cinemas.”By the time she turned to War Paint, her subject matter felt of the moment dramatically as well as politically. Winslet and Lee brought new attention to Miller, but not before the splashy Civil War made a modern likeness of her the centre of its fictional portrait of a bloody American dystopia. Kinmonth raises a wry eyebrow at mention of the film. “I’d like to remake it,” she smiles. “Do it more realistically.” In the medium term, she has plans to make a film about her grandfather. (She says Ralph Fiennes, the most recent Bond movie M, has agreed to star.) “My grandfather’s relationship with Ian Fleming is extraordinary, because his job was to judge between rumour and fact, and then Bond turned it all into fiction.”But first there is War Paint. Having already screened it at the House of Lords in London, she would like to do the same at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In choosing her subjects, Kinmonth says she applied a metric she now hopes defines the whole film. “The aim was to include people with good ideas who wanted to change things. Because I want this film to change things too.”‘War Paint: Women At War’ is in UK cinemas from March 28Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
