In Week 2, we watched Furie, a Vietnamese film about a mother/ex-gangster’s quest for revenge after her daughter is kidnapped by human traffickers.

The first primary theme I noticed being explored in Furie was the empowerment of women.

The central protagonist of the film, Hai, is an ex-gangster who collects debts for her employers, often in a violent manner. She’s also a single mother, taking care of her daughter, Mai. Throughout the course of the film, Hai continues to demonstrate that she is an independent woman, self-sufficient and perfectly capable of existing without the assistance of a man, or other women – she even displays her skill in hand-to-hand combat against multiple men at the same time. Put simply, Hai is less of a ‘damsel in distress’, and more of a ‘Kill Bill‘ type of female lead.

This is all important to note because, according to a study,