Period. End of Sentence: That's All You Need To Know

When Netflix recommended Period. End of Sentence. to me, I rolled my eyes. But then I saw it was only a half hour long and I was in between binge watches, so why not? I never watch Oscar-winning short documentary films, I might as well expand my horizons. Boy, did they get expanded.

The movie is about a group of women living in Hapur, India who learn how to operate a machine that produces cheap, biodegradable sanitary napkins. This is the machine that Arunachalam Muruganantham (affectionately known as the "Pad Man") developed after he discovered the horrors his menstruating wife and other Indian women dealt with on a monthly basis when they didn't have ready access to pads. I already knew about him and his initiative, so I was expecting some sort of hagiographic movie about his work. However, while he does feature in some brief snippets in the film, this is instead a movie about these women, and how this machine changes their lives in a million different ways.

Periods are an extremely taboo topic in India. As the film begins, the filmmakers try to get women and young girls to talk about their periods, and they either look clueless, giggle and won't say anything, or say that it's something God makes happen every month. With the advent of the machine in their midst, the women more freely start to talk about their periods and are fascinated by the notion of having pads instead of dealing with unhygienic cloths or just staying at home for a week when Aunt Flo comes to town. Even the men are curious as to what's going on with the ladies and their machine, which forces them to also have a conversation about women's bodies and what exactly the womenfolk are dealing with.

More impressively, this machine signals a path towards economic independence for a lot of these women. There's an old lady for whom this is the very first job she has ever had in her life. There's a young woman who proudly claims that this year when her brother visits her from town, she will buy him clothes instead of him buying her stuff, thereby upending the traditional (aka patriarchal) brother-sister relationship. And there's the young woman who gathers up the courage to make her first sale and then proudly pockets the few rupees as the first earnings she's ever made. Those earnings will help finance her education as she studies to become a police officer and gain a career instead of waiting to get married.

The machine was funded by kids at Oakland High School, and yes, when they won the Oscar, it was a lot of white ladies on stage. No Indians made this movie (the director, Rayka Zehtabchi, is Iranian-American), and the end credits of the film can feel a bit white savior-ish as they talk about raising the money for this machine by having yogathons. Any time someone speaks in the movie, there's an American voiceover rather than subtitles, which I personally found irritating, because there's so much more you can tell from the tone of the person's voice, even if you can't understand what they're saying. But despite all of that, Period. End of Sentence is a moving and affecting ode to these (extra)ordinary Indian women and reminds us how very simple actions can have powerful consequences. I loved this film, and immediately texted a bunch of my friends to watch it ASAP. Now you should go do the same.