After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Bangladesh sent 160 female Muslim police officers to support the United Nations mission - many of the officers had never been overseas, and had grown up in a society where it was expected women should stay home, not become kickass peacekeepers.

The overseas duty was voluntary - all the women chose to go.

The documentary A Journey of a Thousands Miles: Peacekeepers follows a group of Bangladeshi female police officers sent to Haiti. In a very traditional Muslim society like Bangladesh it was a huge deal for these women to leave their families and go and work for a year overseas.

The job when they got to Haiti was even more challenging.

The doco tells the story of the grumpy husbands left behind, the homesick young women, the thrill of stepping outside of a restrictive identity, and the actual drama of laying down order in a shattered nation where 100,000 had died.

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It's about the awful power of stereotypes, and particularly stereotypes of Muslim women, says co-director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who spoke with Hack while in Australia for the Sydney Film Festival.

"We tend to look at Muslim women through a single prism in the world, especially in the media - it's important to not just look at them as women who belong to a faith, but women who are mothers and sisters and working women and police women.

"Here they are, 160 women who go off to Haiti - from driving the trucks to pitching the tents to patrolling at night and carrying machine guns to arresting Haitians.

"And being the face right there on the streets while violence and protests happen - simply by wearing the uniform and being halfway across the world they're showing many young women in Bangladesh what they're capable of and what the future can hold for them."

Turning the tables

Sharmeen grew up in a very different world to the young women who are her subjects - her parents were wealthy and she went to university in the United States. She has gone on to become one of the famous film-makers in Pakistan - she's the first Pakistani director to win two Oscars.

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Whatsapp Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy.



Among her best known films is A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, about an 18-year-old who survives an honour killing by her father and uncle.

"The thing that differentiates me is education and opportunity," she told Hack. "I could just as easily have been born on the other side of the tracks.

"I definitely want people in the West to watch this film and see these women are no different to any women we see - and the choices they make are very similar to choices we see women making here, like family versus career.

"It's different contexts but the same problems."

"Also, I want people in Bangladesh to watch this film - we want them to celebrate the potential of these women and begin to see the roles of husband and wife can be interchangeable."

This is a difficult lesson.

The women's Haitian mission is a learning experience for their husbands, who have to take on traditionally female roles and become primary caregivers.

"What a twist for a country like Bangladesh," Sharmeen says.

"We are so used to seeing images of women saying goodbye and shedding tears when the men go off - and there is a poignant scene in the film when buses are loaded off with women going off and men are left behind carrying the babies.

"As one of the husbands says in the film, now he realises what a woman has to go through when he's working and looking after children at home."

The husbands ask their wives to act modestly when they're overseas, to not take part in what they call "the other stuff" - things like singing and dancing.

But the women do it anyway.

When they return home, the husband of one of the women admits that he was feeling empty when he had no-one to speak to, that he was vulnerable without her.

"For once the table was turned," Sharmeen says.

Flying into scandal

A Journey of a Thousands Miles is not all heart-warming stereotype-smashing, it's also about peacekeepers struggling to keep the peace in a nation where disaster has left a million people homeless.

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Whatsapp A tent camp in Port-au-Prince.

In October 2010, 10 months after the quake, an epidemic of cholera broke out for the first time in the country's recorded history. As hundreds began to sicken and die, rumours began circulating that the disease had been brought to the country by the peacekeepers themselves (several studies later found this was probably what happened).

The young Bangladeshi peacekeepers flew into the scandal.

"It's interesting these women did not know the UN was involved in the cholera scandal before they went to Haiti," Sharmeen says.

"The first riots take place and they're wondering why these people are rioting - the political context of Haiti hasn't been explained to these women.

"They see themselves as women who are going there to keep peace - once they arrive on the ground over there and see the level of poverty, see no development, see Haitians living in squalid conditions, they begin to empathise with the Haitians.

"The fact they come from a poor country helps them empathise with Haitians."

Female peacekeepers were especially effective at patrolling the refugee camps where there was a very high level of abuse of women, Sharmeen says.

"Having female peacekeepers on the ground, a lot of Haitian woman said it gave them a sense of security. The UN is encouraging more and more women to enlist - they have found they are less threatening to the community that lives there. That's what we realised when we spoke to the Haitians."