Wintersoldier is Phenix’s first film, made with 14 other artists, activists and filmmakers during the Wintersoldier Investigation in Detroit in 1971.  Members of Veterans Against the War told of the horror, shame and sorrow they felt about the war in hopes of educating the American public to end it.  In this experience, she saw that film could be a powerful tool in giving voices to people whose stories were boycotted by mainstream media.  Though screened at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, televised once by WNET and honored abroad, Wintersoldier was largely ignored during the Vietnam War by American press and distributors.

“Beginning with Wintersoldier, I left my profession teaching young kids to start making documentary films because I believed that if people knew the stories behind the largely unquestioned assumptions that come to all of us through the media that people would act differently, stand up to injustice, maybe see their own prejudices and help change themselves and their world.  It was a youthful, hopeful kind of naivete.”

  “...at this time in the protest against the war in Vietnam, when I experienced the veterans in the Wintersoldier Investigation talking about being soldiers and talking about war and really not shying away from going to the most horrible places because they had to tell the truth though the truth was unbearable --unbearable to live with and unbearable to speak-- and everybody who witnessed it was shaken --for their whole lives.  And I was one of the people who was shaken....”