Period. End of Sentence won under the Best Documentary Short Subject category at the 91st Academy Awards today. The film was the only entry to get shortlisted from India this year. Directed by Rayka Zehtabchi and produced by Guneet Monga, Period talks about the stigma around menstruation in the village of Hapur near Delhi.
The film follows a group of women who learn to operate a machine that makes bio degradable sanitary pads which they sell at low prices to the women in their village. They observe a change in attitude towards menstruation after the machine gets set up.
Students of Los Angeles’ Oakwood School funded the machine with the help of their teacher Melissa Berton. They raised an amount of $3,000 by organising bake sales and yogathons.
After the women in Hapur began work, they wanted to document the changing attitude towards menstruation and started a campaign on Kickstarter to raise $40,000 to make a film on this. The filmmakers also met Arunachalam Muruganantham from Coimbatore who was the inventor of low cost sanitary pad machines.
A report says that a parent of one of the students of Oakwood School contacted Guneet Monga to produce the film. Monga travelled to Oakwood to meet the students and their teacher Melissa Berton, who co-produced the film.
“She [Berton] is the dreamer who said that you girls can do this. She is meeting parents and hustling to raise the money which is not easy to do,” said Monga. “The intent is so pure and the story is so beautiful. It’s amazing that we have got so far.”
The film was made in 2016 by Iranian-American director Rayka Zehtabchi, and Mandakini Kakar, a producer with Monga’s Sikhya Entertainment. The team contacted Action India to help with the interviews of the women in Hapur. The director said in an interview that after the film was made the team formed an organisation to set up more such machines.
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“There was always a lot of support and interest, but since the launch of the film, there has been an additional pad machine installed in the neighboring village, and we also launched the nonprofit, The Pad Project.… Every time we’ve imagined a ceiling for this film, it’s been broken. The most valuable thing is not the film’s success, but rather pushing its narrative,” she said.
She said the film was for women in India and in other countries, “Who feel ashamed because of their period, or are even just embarrassed to talk about their periods.” In her speech after receiving the Oscars this morning, director Rayka Zehtabchi said, “I can’t believe a film about menstruation just won an Oscar.”
Period was nominated along with the documentary films Black Sheep by Ed Perkins, End Game by Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, Lifeboat by Skye Fitzgerald, and A Night At The Garden by Marshall Curry.
Image Courtesy: OhMyIndia.com