Traditionally, one of the least interesting of Oscar categories has been the documentary short award. That used to be the moment for a lot of folks to take a quick bathroom break or head to the kitchen for more popcorn or cookies. Times change, however, and the current winner of the Academy Award for documentary short is worthy of your attention. Take 26 minutes from your day and see it online.
The film is called PERIOD. END OF SENTENCE. The setting is an area outside New Delhi, in Northern India, but this film could be set in any of thousands of districts of developing countries. The issue is a universal one – menstruation. We see in this district near New Delhi that teenaged girls are leaving schools because they cannot deal with the inconveniences and embarrassment, as well as health hazards, of having their periods. These young women, as well as their older sisters and mothers, are missing out on aspects of their lives due to menstruation conditions. Without proper clean pads, they rely on dirty rags, leaves, and even ashes. Their primitive protective garb sometimes causes infections, sometimes causes shame.
Many boys and men either want to know nothing about menstruation, or they laugh out of shyness and ignorance – or maybe cruelty. Ignorance in the community brings many to consider menstruation an illness or a girls’ problem. Females are instructed not to go into the temples when this monthly “dirty” bleeding is occurring. That fact reminds me that, as a teenager, I was told in hushed tones not to go up onto the altar in Synagogue when I had my period.
To tell you the truth, the attitudes of speaking publicly about menstruation remind me of what life was like in small-town America when I was first learning about the workings of the female body. If you got your period during school hours, you only whispered to your best girlfriends about it. It was mortifying. My own mother did not speak to me about menstruation; she merely slapped my face lightly when I first let her know – panic-stricken as I was at the age of twelve -- that I had bled through my pajama bottoms. My mother wasn’t an abuser; she simply was carrying out some odd, old-world Jewish tradition as her own mother had done, to welcome my womanhood. I tell this anecdote to stress that menstruation, in my lifetime, has been a quirky topic – a hushed and misunderstood topic even for those of us in so-called developed countries.
Girls and women in developing countries are starting to learn that they do not have to suffer with primitive conditions as they menstruate. In the area outside New Delhi shown in PERIOD. END OF SENTENCE, Iranian-American filmmaker Rayka Zehtabchi tells us about a community of women who join forces to obtain a machine to make clean, less bulky menstrual pads. They create a home-based factory for these pads, and they sell them to local stores and door-to-door. Everyone benefits. Girls do not drop out of school as often, and women in general are more productive. When this film was released, the production team formed The Pad Project, an organization to fight the stigma of menstruation worldwide. For more information, go to thepadproject.org.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former Director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and has co-authored several entertainment biographies with her husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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