March 15, 2019
It was the third Oscar for an Iranian and the first Oscar for an Iranian-American last month as California-born Rayka Zehtabchi took home a golden statuette as director of the documentary short “Period. End of Sentence.”
As Zehtabchi, 25, stood at the microphone, she said, “I can’t believe an Oscar is going to a film about menstruation.”
Tears were pouring down her cheeks and she quickly said, “I’m not crying because I’m on my period or anything.”
But in a year that was super-sensitive to feminist issues, it probably should not have been a surprise that an Oscar went to a film about menstruation—a much-talked about short documentary on young girls in India facing isolation and embarrassment over menstruation. Zebtabchi’s film is probably the most-talked about short documentary ever, especially considering that short documentaries are rarely talked about at all.
In fact, that Oscar category is considered so obscure by many that the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences had announced earlier in the year that the Oscars for it and two other categories would not be announced on the broadcast. The Academy soon reversed that decision, however, and Zehtabchi got her minute on stage.
The film is set in a rural village in India, where women band together to install and operate a sanitary pad-making machine, combating the crushing stigma of menstruation, improving accessibility to sanitary products and discovering newfound independence and hopes for a better future.
Zehtabchi made her directorial debut with Madaran, a Persian-language short about an Iranian mother, played by Mary Apick, who is confronted with the decision of whether to end or spare the life of the person who killed her son. Zehtabchi knows Persian, but she doesn’t know Hindi, the language in which her Oscar-winning film was made.
A group of high school girls in Los Angeles, organized by one of their teachers, had raised money to buy the pad-making machine. They thought it would help to have a documentary made about their efforts in order to raise more funds. They talked to their moms and dads, many of whom are involved in the movie industry, and one of them asked Zehtabchi to direct the film.
Zehtabchi is the 13th Iranian to be nominated for an Oscar. Two Oscars have previously been awarded to Asghar Farhadi in the Best Foreign Language Film category, in 2012 and 2016. All nominees apart from Farhadi have been expatriates.
The 18 nominations those 13 Iranians have received have been in 11 different categories, an indication of just how deeply integrated into the film industry the Iranian-American community is. Zehtabchi was the first to win a nomination in the short documentary category.
Her 25-minute film has won widespread attention within the feminist movement and won much recognition at film festivals for addressing a very difficult topic. It was those festival awards that qualified her for the Oscar nomination.
For decades, the women in this tiny Indian village didn’t have access to pads, which resulted in health problems and girls missing school or dropping out entirely. But when the sanitary pad machine was installed in the village, the women learned to manufacture and market their own pads. The ladies felt so inspired that they named their brand Fly, because they wanted women “to soar.”
“Period. End of Sentence.” was a film Zehtabchi never expected she would make. “The story found me,” she said in an interview before the awards. “I think it’s a really special project because of all the things that happened in the background before I even came on board to direct the film.”
Zehtabchi had just graduated from the Film School at the University of Southern California when she was approached in 2016 by producer Garret K. Schiff about the project. His daughter, Ruby, was part of a club at her high school that “wanted to tackle this worldwide issue of women and girls who are dropping out of school because of their periods, and because of a lack of access to sanitary hygiene products,” Zehtabchi explained. When they heard about the low-cost machine developed in India, they wanted to install one in a village and make a film about it “because it’s ultimately going to be the best way to spread awareness about this issue.”
The director said she was “deeply moved and shocked to hear that this was … going on for so many women around the globe, and that I had no prior knowledge of it. I really felt like this is activism at its finest,” as well as “a really great opportunity as a filmmaker to expand my horizons and help kick-start this whole movement.”
As to where she goes from here, she told VOA Persian, “I’m very interested in telling Iranian stories as well as women’s stories. I was raised in Southern California pretty much my whole life, but the older I get, the more I feel like I connect with and learn about my Iranian culture.”
She said, “My dad passed away three years ago from lung cancer, and I wish he could have been there to see it [the Oscar award], because he would have been very proud.”
The filmmaker said one of her next productions will be a narrative feature about her family’s journey to the United States in the early 1990s. “I’m very interested in exploring the immigrant experience and how it could be devastating but also hilarious at times, being a foreigner in a new country and having to learn how to assimilate.”
Just 10 days before the Oscar ceremony, Hyperion, one of Hollywood’s major talent agencies, signed Zehtabchi as a client, a sign that her career is likely to take off swiftly even though she is only 25 years old.
In the 91-year history of the Oscars, only five women have been nominated for an Oscar for best director of a feature film. And this year, despite the focus on women, all the nominees were again men. But with the emphasis in the US film industry on increasing opportunities for women, Zehtabchi is likely to be in great demand.
The Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported on Zebtabchi’s award in a brief story that said her film was “about the health problems of women in India.”