Film Review
Period: End of Sentence
This 2019 Oscar Best Short Documentary winner is created by Oakwood High School students who also founded a nonprofit organization called The Pad Project which aims to fight the stigma around menstruation.
The story is set in Hapur district of Uttar Pradesh in India, where a local group of women that never had access to sanitary pads, was introduced to a newly-installed machine that could make the pads. It’s a compilation of experiences, beliefs and a certain kind of oppressive thought structure that continues to persist and yet, is never the talk of the town. It’s a story of change and how it is perceived by the people.
The documentary begins with a glimpse of a dark shanty with two girls giggling over a question directed to them. What is different is that the giggle is of embarrassment than mere humour. The lens of the documentary takes the viewer back and forth from ill-lit rooms to lush green meadows, flooded with light. Quite noticeably, wherever women are concerned, the light is generally dim and dingy, almost representing their dark realities. Even though these women are born of nature and deserve the light of freedom and comfort, they have been pushed into a dark prison of silent oppression. Menacing is the fact that this prison is guarded by millions of our own men and women, forming the society. Nature isn’t discriminatory, society is. It normalizes certain things and mortifies others. It turns certain issues into taboos, that too in a way that it becomes utterly hard to erase certain perceptions about them from people’s minds.
Menstruation is a taboo topic all across the globe, in not just developing countries like India but also developed countries like America. The stigma that surrounds menstruation is tremendous and results in health problems and girls missing school or dropping out entirely in rural areas, as shown in the documentary. Period: End Of Sentence does also overshadow period stigma. The following lines best describe this stigma surrounding menstruation as explored in the film.
“ Period stigma is the inability for someone to speak clearly and comfortably about their own bodies. It is whispering to ask a friend for a pad instead of being able to ask for one openly like you might be able to ask for a Band-Aid. It is keeping quiet about severe menstrual cramps at work, instead of being able to express honestly that you are in pain. Not having socially acceptable vocabulary for being able to talk about your own body comfortably is the most effective form of oppression. It prevents actual medical emergencies or problems from being reported. It can prevent solutions for how to care for yourself when on your period, from being shared ! ”
Says Kiran Gandhi who is an American gender equality activist and musician based in Los Angeles.
Silence generally takes over when there is lack of speech, in the film however, it has been beautifully used as the dagger of social barriers. It goes on to narrate the hidden stories that have been waiting for evolution since ages. You don’t really wait for them to say something, you know the quiet is a tale in itself. The silence of the women on camera, the way they avoid talking about sanitary pads with the interviewers, does not end at spreading out the reality of our present, but forces you to guess what the same problem must have been like in the past and what it may continue to be like in the near future. It has been illuminated in such a way that it’s more factual, emotional and impactful and speaks way more than dialogues or actions because it is perhaps a product of the two.
The music sometimes is playful and jolly. It identifies the humour in the situation, the reality of how the natural biological process that allows the creation of lives and acts as a cleanser of female bodies can be shamed for centuries together and used as a tool for pulling them down. As shown in the documentary, if women can be made to feel ashamed and uncomfortable just by its mention in public, if they cannot buy sanitary napkins from shops because they feel embarrassed and cannot find appropriate vocabulary to define the process, then it is indeed a major social obstacle.
Women in the village regard independence as a boon and all they wish for is some freedom and equal respect. They wish to rise above all social barriers, soar high into the sky which is why they name their sanitary pads brand ‘Fly’. They don’t just want change, they need it. And terribly so.
One might say that the problem may not be that great, for the women, interestingly, don’t seem hopeless, dull or sad. But then you realize that they have accepted their world the way it is and that the problem’s existence itself is unknown to them. That is the power of age old traditional oppression. It doesn’t let you see whatever it does not want you to see.
Both men and women in the documentary regarded menstruation as a ‘problem’ or worse, an ‘illness’. Selling and making sanitary napkins attracted some excited crowds and embarrassed some.
As you take a tour of the village, the cinematography allows you to feel the journey, the experiences and the reality.
Period: End of Sentence is a film that is brutal, simply because it’s true in every single aspect. It’s a documentary that talks more about the vastness and depth of the sea, than its mere existence. It makes you realize that it’s high time we turn the page and let the story proceed, let these millions of women know that there’s so much more to their story than the page they are stuck on.