February 15, 2019
Iranian-American film director Rayka Zehtabchi has been nominated for an Oscar in the “Best Documentary Short Subject” category for her film about menstruation in India titled, “Period. End of Sentence.”
She has one previous film to her credit, a Farsi short, “Madaran,” about a mother in Iran who must decide whether her son’s killer will hang or be spared execution. Mary Apick stared in that short film, which won many honors at film festivals in the US.
Zehtabchi speaks Farsi, so language was not a barrier making “Madaran.” But she speaks no Hindi, which was a big challenge while directing a film in rural India that interviewed women in Hindi about one of the most sensitive and taboo topics in villages.
The film grew out of a project led by Melissa Berton, a high school English teacher in Los Angeles who learned a few years ago about the problems of Indian girls, who often don’t know what menstruation is all about and who hide themselves in embarrassment each month when they menstruate.
The teacher recruited six of her students and they organized a project to provide a machine that makes sanitary napkins to the village of Hapur, not far from Delhi in northern India.
Later, they decided that a documentary would help promote the project and enable them to help more villages.
A number of the students had parents in the film business who recruited Zehtabchi as director and her boyfriend, Sam Davis, 26, as cinematographer, sound man and general jack-of-all-trades.
The film interviews many of the village women before the pad machine arrives. Zehtabchi and her team returned months later to film the same women who describe how their lives have changed. Not only does the pad machine handle the embarrassment of menstruation, but it became a successful business that provided the women with income.
When the machine first arrived, however, many of the women were so shy that they lied to the men and said the machine made diapers.
Zehtabchi said the biggest challenge in making the film was “entering into remote villages as foreigners with a film crew to interview people about an extremely culturally sensitive topic, all while striving to maintain the natural order of the village. We wanted the interviews to be as comfortable and organic as possible. So, if a crowd gathered, any level of intimacy was immediately compromised.”
On one day, a village elder stopped them from entering a village.
The film was India’s selection for the Best Foreign Language Film category, but failed to win a nomination there.
Zehtabchi is one of the five nominees in her category, and the only woman. The other four nominated films and their directors are:
• “Black Sheep,” Ed Perkins.
• “End Game,” Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman.
• “Lifeboat,” Skye Fitzgerald.
• “A Night at the Garden,” Marshall Curry.
The Oscars winners will be announced February 24.
