The Women Who Built a Battlefield Hospital in France: Portugal's Forgotten WWI Nurses Finally Get Their Story

The Portuguese Red Cross archive holds a forgotten narrative that premieres in national cinemas today—a documentary unearthing the role of elite Portuguese women who built and staffed a battlefield hospital in France during World War I, a chapter erased from most history books.

Why This Matters

• First-person reconstruction: Director Cláudia Alves uses uncatalogued Red Cross documents—letters, telegrams, blueprints—to recreate the story of the "damas enfermeiras" who opened the Ambleteuse hospital on 9 April 1918, the day the Battle of La Lys began.

• Gender invisibility challenged: The film explicitly questions why Portuguese war history is told exclusively through male voices and frames the nurses' service as a metaphor for the struggle for equality.

• Cinematic release after festival circuit: "Damas" premiered globally at the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG) in Mexico in 2025 and arrives in Portugal after navigating what Alves describes as oversaturation in the documentary market.

How a Routine Archive Visit Became a Rescue Mission

Cláudia Alves, a Lisbon-born filmmaker trained in Cuba and Italy, stumbled onto the project in 2018 while researching a separate RTP documentary titled "A Vida nas Trincheiras" (Life in the Trenches). In the attic of the Red Cross headquarters at Janelas Verdes, she found an uncatalogued folder containing intact correspondence, service logs, floor plans, identification cards, and photographs of the nurses who served at the Hospital de Ambleteuse in northwestern France.

"I had no idea these women had participated in the war," Alves told Lusa. The discovery was both fortunate and puzzling: Portugal's wartime archive is sparse, lacking the cinematic footage that institutions like London's Imperial War Museum possess. British archives provided the visual material; Portuguese archives supplied the emotional record—handwritten complaints, formal reports revealing power struggles, and logistical notes from a hospital constructed under fire.

Alves initially sought personal diaries, convinced the nurses had kept intimate accounts. She traced genealogical lines and contacted descendants, but no diaries surfaced. "I wanted the intimate portrait—the desires, the frustrations, the hardships they faced," she explained. "When that wasn't possible, I had to put myself in the place of one of them and tie together the loose ends."

The Hospital That Opened on the Bloodiest Day

The Ambleteuse hospital, erected from scratch by the volunteer nurses, opened its doors precisely when the Battle of La Lys erupted—one of the deadliest engagements for the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps (CEP) in France. The timing was not ceremonial; it was urgent. The structure served wounded soldiers flooding back from the front and became a symbol of capacity under extreme duress.

These women were not trained medical professionals. They were high-society volunteers organized under the Portuguese Red Cross and groups like Ana de Castro Osório's "Pela Pátria" movement and the Cruzada das Mulheres Portuguesas, formed in 1916. The war catalyzed Portugal's first nursing schools, established in Lisbon and Porto in 1918 in direct response to the CEP's medical needs.

A monument at the Ambleteuse site today acknowledges the Portuguese soldiers—and the Red Cross-built hospital—but the nurses themselves remain unnamed in most historical accounts.

Four-Part Narrative Built on Fiction and Fact

"Damas" is structured in four segments: an introduction where Alves recounts her archive discovery; "Diário de Portugal" (Diary from Portugal), which contextualizes the pre-war era and the social milieu of the volunteers; "Crónicas de Guerra" (War Chronicles), focused on hospital construction and battlefield episodes; and an epilogue examining the post-war return.

The film mixes archival material, Super 8 film, staged reenactments, and a first-person fictional voiceover—a composite character Alves created to thread the fragmented evidence into a coherent story. "I put several scattered threads together," she said. "Sometimes I think I placed them ahead of their time. When the character speaks about suffragettes, I'm not certain she personally knew that struggle."

The technique is deliberate: Alves uses the absence of diaries as creative license to imagine what the nurses might have felt, grounding speculation in the tensions visible in the surviving letters. Some correspondence was formal, reflecting hierarchy; other notes were raw, expressing frustration and exhaustion.

Budget Constraints and the Cost of International Footage

Development began in 2018, gained public funding in 2020, and weathered a two-year writing phase during the pandemic. Filming and editing stretched across 2023 and 2024, produced by Ukbar Filmes. Yet budget limits shaped the final product. International archival footage—especially film—is prohibitively expensive. "You can pay €3,000 per minute for international cinematic archives," Alves said. "The cost is very high, especially for documentary filmmakers working with limited resources."

The film premiered at FICG in 2025 and passed through the Arché - Doclisboa lab, where it won the best film in development prize. Alves described the path to theatrical release as emblematic of broader challenges: "There's saturation in production. Works pile up at festival gates and never reach the general public."

What This Means for Residents

"Damas" arrives at a moment when Portugal's historiography is slowly incorporating feminist perspectives that challenge the traditional, male-centered war narrative. The film is not a dry academic exercise; it's a visual argument about who gets remembered and why.

For viewers, especially those unfamiliar with Portugal's World War I involvement, the documentary functions as both a rescue and a critique—rescuing the nurses from oblivion while critiquing the archival systems that left them there. It also raises practical questions about how national memory is preserved. The fact that a major discovery sat uncatalogued in the Red Cross attic until 2018 underscores the fragility of historical documentation in Portugal, where film archives remain sparse compared to wealthier European neighbors.

Educational institutions, history enthusiasts, and gender studies programs will find the film immediately useful as a case study in how war mobilization reshaped women's roles in early 20th-century Portugal. The opening of nursing schools in 1918 was a direct consequence of the CEP's needs, marking a shift toward professionalized female labor that extended beyond the war.

The Broader Context of Women in WWI

The Primeira Guerra Mundial (First World War) forced unprecedented female participation across Europe. In France, 400,000 women worked in munitions factories by 1918. Britain saw a 50% increase in female industrial and commercial labor by 1917. The Women's Land Army in the UK mobilized over 113,000 women to manage farms.

Russia was an outlier, allowing women to serve in combat roles. Maria Bochkareva ("Yashka") led the 1st Women's Battalion of Death, a rare example of female soldiers in WWI. Portugal's contribution was different but no less significant: the damas enfermeiras embodied the auxiliary mobilization that characterized most Allied nations, yet their story remained invisible in the national narrative.

Post-war, several countries granted women the vote—Russia, Germany, the United States, and Britain—though Portugal lagged behind. The war's end triggered conservative backlash urging women to return home, but the economic and social shifts proved irreversible. Feminization of certain sectors, especially services and healthcare, continued through the 1920s.

Feminist Historiography and the Challenge to "Exceptionalism"

Traditional historical accounts treated women's wartime labor as temporary and exceptional, reinforcing the paradigm that men fight and women assist. Feminist scholars now contest this "linear optimism" about war-driven emancipation, highlighting how post-war societies attempted to restore male dominance even as women gained new rights.

Alves positions "Damas" within this revisionist framework. Her film does not claim the nurses achieved full equality; it shows them navigating constrained agency within patriarchal institutions. The suffragette references in the voiceover are speculative, but they signal a broader context of feminist organizing that overlapped with the war years.

The documentary thus operates on dual levels: as a historical retrieval and as a meditation on how absence—of diaries, of images, of institutional memory—shapes collective understanding. Alves fills the archival gaps with fiction, making the silences audible.

Distribution Challenges and the Documentary Market

Alves's comment about festival saturation reflects a structural problem in Portuguese cinema. Documentaries compete for limited theatrical space, often relegated to niche screenings or television. "Damas" benefited from the Doclisboa lab and international festival exposure, but reaching mainstream audiences required persistence.

The film's release today positions it within a growing interest in untold Portuguese histories, particularly those involving colonial and wartime experiences. Yet distribution networks favor commercial genres, and art-house documentaries depend on institutional support and cultural programming to survive beyond festival circuits.

For residents, the theatrical release offers a rare opportunity to engage with this material on the big screen before it migrates to streaming platforms or educational settings.

Final Considerations

"Damas" is more than a tribute to forgotten nurses. It is a calculated intervention in how Portugal remembers its role in the Grande Guerra (Great War), insisting that history cannot be complete if half the population is erased. Alves's hybrid approach—mixing archive, reenactment, and speculative fiction—mirrors the fragmented nature of the evidence itself.

The film's value lies less in definitive answers than in the questions it forces: Why were these women not documented more thoroughly? What other stories remain in uncatalogued folders? And what does it mean that a filmmaker, rather than a historian or archivist, brought this to light?

For audiences in Portugal, "Damas" is an invitation to reconsider what counts as history and who deserves to be part of it. The nurses of Ambleteuse built a hospital under fire and cared for soldiers in one of the war's most brutal battles. Their story, finally, has a cinematic home.