Ordinary Lady Goes to Dunkirk

 A few years ago, hotshot director Christopher Nolan released an epic film about the evacuation of Dunkirk during the Second World War; imaginatively titled Dunkirk.


Over the next few weeks, I plan to feature several films that deal with World War II in various ways (all of which still fall within our theme of Ordinary Ladies) and it seems only fitting to begin with a film that powerfully evokes this crucial moment of wartime history, when so many brave men and women came together to save the lives of so many thousands of soldiers.


I'm joking, of course.

Featuring Christopher Nolan in a series devoted to women is about as appropriate as including Leni Riefenstahl in a Jewish Film Festival (spoiler alert: it's not appropriate at all). Nolan may very well be a talented and visionary film-maker (I don't think he is, but I'm sure he would disagree with me) but one thing he absolutely does not do is treat women with any respect. The female characters in his films tend to be marginalized or dead, with the exception of the ones who are marginalized and dead (not necessarily in that order) and his Dunkirk opus is notable for its inclusion of (virtually) no women. Not even of any kind.

One could argue that the evacuation of Dunkirk was an episode of military history, and was consequently a story about men (lots and lots of men) but as we will see this Thursday, leaving women out of that story is merely marginalizing them yet again. I think we can safely leave that to the Christopher Nolans of this world while we get on with the film that we are going to see:

Their Finest is a British film, released in 2016 (a year before Christopher Nolan's manly effort) based on the novel Their Finest Hour and a Half, by Lissa Evans. It tells the story of Katrin Cole, a young writer in 1940 who gets a job writing film scripts for the Ministry of Information, and who eventually collaborates on a successful wartime drama about two sisters who pilot their father's fishing boat to Dunkirk to assist in the evacuation.

Partly a story about the role of cinema during wartime (and the role of women in the film industry) Their Finest is also a story about Dunkirk itself, and the efforts of the ordinary women and men who worked so hard to salvage the situation.


With so many young men fed into the war machine to be churned up and consumed by industrial death and destruction, the Second World War provided a generation of women with opportunities they had never been given before, and that is the story of this particular (very special) film.

We will be screening Their Finest at 7.30 on Thursday, the 15th of September, at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

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