PERIOD: THE END OF MENSTRUATION? and THE ABORTION DIARIES

PERIOD: THE END OF MENSTRATION? (7:30 PM)

This screening is co-sponsored by The Blood Sisters

PERIOD: THE END OF MENSTRUATION? addresses trends in birth control which allow women and young girls to stop their periods for months and years at a time. Utilizing methods of direct cinema, cinema verite, and poetic construction, Period highlights health practitioners, cultural critics, and a variety of women from around the country who fall on different sides of the menstrual suppression debate. Several of these individuals impact the future of menstruation trends while others are directly affected by these trends. A handful of participants engage with menstruation to construct their gendered identity. Gender, the body, and identity are themes central to Period, a film which opens up a discussion of gender construction that challenge essentialist viewpoints on ‘woman’ and ‘bleeding.’ The film seeks to make visible and audible a taboo subject so that the health risks associated with the modes of menstrual suppression will be made public. Further, the film calls for reflection around the act of menstruation and presents multiple interpretations of this hidden bodily function.

After two and a half years of research, intensive 16mm filming and sound recording, and numerous trips around the country to visit with over 50 participants, Period has proven to be a timely and necessary work. In 1998, 10 million women and girls around the world were on Depo Provera (the shot that stops menstruation.) With the 2003 release of Seasonale, a pill designed to allow only four bleeding episodes each year, Barr Labs garnered $50 million in sales of the drug in one year. Yet studies discussed in the film show that these methods can lead to loss of bone density and osteoporosis in young women. Side effects include depression, cardiac ailments, blood clots, break through bleeding and loss of libido. New studies reveal that hormones in pharmaceuticals have environmental consequences: hormones from the millions of people on birth control end up in our drinking water through excretion.

Director / Producer Giovanna Chesler met with physicians and health practitioners around the country who fall on both sides of the menstrual suppression debate: from those who maintain that technology should make menstruation virtually obsolete to those who see menstruation as defining the essence of being female. However, in constructing Period, Giovanna was determined to equate the experiences and opinions of every day Americans to medical knowledge. Women and men of diverse ethnic communities, of varying sexual orientations and varying ages share intimate details of their experiences and feelings on menstruation. We meet an African American woman in San Diego who was so troubled by her period that she chose to have a hysterectomy at age 33, We see a white urban professional in her late 20’s getting a shot of Depo Provera. She tells us that she has not menstruated in three years. However, a transman living in New York City chooses to keep his period and claims it as part of his masculinity, while an artist in San Francisco paints with her menstrual blood.

Period: The End of Menstruation? calls for more research around menstrual suppressants, and asks women to carefully consider what it means to bleed. The film serves as a beginning to much needed public conversation and brings attention to a pressing women’s health issue that affects millions of women on a national and global scale.

USA / 2005 / 54min

Directed, filmed and produced by Giovanna Chesler

Official Site

THE ABORTION DIARIES (8:30 PM)

The Abortion Diaries is a documentary featuring 12 women who speak candidly about their experiences with abortion. The women are doctors, subway workers, artists, activists, military personnel, teachers and students; they are Black, Latina , Jewish and White; they are mothers or child-free; they range in age from 19 to 54. Their stories weave together with the filmmaker's diary entries to present a compelling, moving and at times surprisingly funny "dinner party" where the audience is invited to hear what women say behind closed doors about motherhood, medical technology, sex, spirituality, love, work and their own bodies.

USA / 2005 / 30min

Produced/Directed by Penny Lane
Edited by Penny Lane and Anne Leaf Barliant
Camera by Joseph Victorine and Elizabeth Ellis
Sound Recording by Christopher Asta
Original music by Guitars & Hearts , Alpha Ursa & Jump Cannon
With funding from the Puffin Foundation

Official Site