“Period. End of Sentence.” is a 2018 documentary short (which just won an Oscar, by the way) about a group of Indian women who receive a machine that enables them to make sanitary napkins, and therefore start to address some of the issues that menstruation had caused for them. The film is shot in the reflexive style, with the film makers asking the subjects questions as the cameras roll and leaving those conversations in the final cut.
Once the women in the film learn how to use the machine and begin making their own pads, they come up with an idea to start selling them door to door, since there’s such a stigma in their culture and women often don’t want to buy pads in front of men. This introduces the unanswered question of this film, which is “will these women be successful in their business endeavor?” There’s a second part to this conflict as well, that may not be as clear but is still present. That second conflict lies in whether or not these women, or all women in India, can start to rise up out of the patriarchal society and create new roles for themselves. This is alluded to when the young girls are talking about dropping out of school when they get their periods and also when one older woman is talking about her friend who’s a police officer and people know her for what she does, not her who her father is. She says in that interview that the female police officer has the best life because of this.
Apparently, you can’t take screenshots in Netflix. This is especially unfortunate because I did it the entire way through the film and only realized once I went to upload them that they were all black, so I’ll do the best I can without.
The film looks very cinematic in terms of the color, but there is an element of shakiness to the footage that makes it feel authentic as well. In the darker spaces inside homes, the shadows are deep. Outside, the light is not warm but very light as if it were a bright and cloudy much of the time. The shots of people are use a lot of unique angles that I enjoyed, but I can’t help but wonder if they’re the type of thing a film professor might critique. The angles were were often a bit lower or a lot more off to the side during interviews than we’re generally taught to do. It’s consistent enough throughout the piece that it appears to be a style and not a mistake, though, and I really thought they added a fresh take to an old format.
At 12:40 the videographer does an excellent job of getting ahead of the action. The camera is set up inside of a dark room before the women open up a door from the outside and walk across the frame as the space fills with daylight. The only thing my eye was craving here that I didn’t get to see was after they walked across the space they were opening another door, and I would have very much liked to see them all exit the frame as well.
The cameraperson gets very up close and personal to the women in this film, which is shocking considering how shy they all are about the subject matter, but it’s also what I admire and think we could learn the most from. So often when I’m shooting I feel like I need to catch everything that’s happening within the entire frame or it won’t make sense, but here the rely mostly on tight and medium shots to tell the story. Around the 18 minute mark, when the woman speaking says “Now tell me, who wants to change things?” the music comes in and we see hands exchanging pads for money, it feels so much more exciting than it would if it were just composed as a wide shot.
“Period. End of Sentence.” is streaming now on Netflix.
–Amanda Rhoades