As millions of women and girls take shots and pills to stop their periods, the meaning of menstruation changes. Current marketing of hormonal birth control (Depo-Provera, Seasonale, Seasonique, Lybrel, Anya) attracts customers by promising freedom from monthly periods. For many consumers, menstrual suppression eliminates painful monthly flow, giving them more control in their lives. For others, menstrual suppression represents a frightening shift in thinking about the human body and another dangerous experiment on woman’s health. Period: The End of Menstruation? interrogates the cultural and medical side effects of suppression before 'the curse' disappears.
The thirteen-minute documentary film contains a series of interviews where girls and women aged 10-27 discuss the 'girl to woman' experience alongside their beliefs, perceptions and experiences of menarche, adolescence and the menstrual experience.
A grandmother discusses past and present attitudes toward menstruation.
Short film about the menstrual cycle
Tibetan Buddhist nuns from the Thupten Choling monastery in the Himalayan foothills discuss their mentruation practices.
The manifesto of a body that bleeds by nature, the reconnection with the ancestors and the self-portrayed voice of a woman who seeks to break with the oppression that has forced us to experience menstruation with fear, shame and rejection.
Amalia, a girl of thirteen, gets her first period one day before leaving for the seaside with her parents.
The film twice states that it doesn't intend a moral injunction, but it clearly does with comments such as "our society... regards sexual intercourse outside marriage as irresponsible and possibly disastrous" and "you can use your knowledge with responsibility and real love or you can use it wantonly and with mere animal appetite". This is clearly marriage education not sex education.
A sophomore struggles to get passed embarrassment when she receives her menstrual cycle in front of her fellow students. Emotions run high, as growth chases her physically and mentally.
A violent sneeze in church leaves a teenage girl confined to a claustrophobic bathroom stall, which grows more bloody and nightmarish by the minute, as she struggles to get a tampon.
A young girl gets her first menstrual period.
After several farmyard analogies featuring chicks and calves, the well-spoken narrator and director of the film, Winifred Holmes, considers the subject of girls and how they reach adulthood and readiness for the 'important job of motherhood.
Gala is preparing for the firefighter exam when she gets her period accompanied by severe menstrual pain. Together with her father Alfonso, they must figure out how to manage the situation.
Eun-jung, who is poor enough to buy a sanitary pad, leaves school without her father's knowledge and sneaks into her house. And they spend the day in their own way, familiarly.
A weekend father wants to bond with his teenage daughter by taking her with him to the carwash. They end up on a life-changing adventure in the supermarket, at the endless sanitary towel aisle. They get "help" from an older lady who shares intimate stories of her experience, some about menstruation, some on wildly different topics.
Unable to afford proper menstrual products, Chloe is constantly faced with anxiety and humiliation; this is not the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. 'Absent' is based on multiple true stories and made in association with Freedom4girls. It aims to raise awareness around period poverty in the UK.
Thrown between reality and false Catholic narratives, Luna questions her sanity, exploring independence moving into her first ever apartment, as each full moon brings on a wave of terror she can't control.
Tilly, Miah and Safa are three young women who endure debilitating period pain. Following an adolescence with little menstrual education, support or relief, they navigate the physical and emotional toll of intensely painful periods while trying to maintain a normal life.
Delphyne (meaning ‘womb’) discusses the stigma around menstruation. Addressing shame and acceptance, taboos around menstrual blood are told through a fabric-themed metaphor, and the conflict between a mother-daughter relationship; to find a shared unity and language to beat the conflict which projects itself in the shame metaphor that they’ve unwound and removed from their life. The historical connotations of staining, feminine purity and the divide between private and public space as well as ownership of the body come into play. The coming of age theme is reflected in reference to her struggle with the self (alter-ego), struggle with the ‘other’ (male influence) and struggle with the home (her Mother).