Geetha, a control and order loving Indian-American woman, finally has sex with Vehd one afternoon but things quickly turn messy when period blood stains her pristine couch and a fight erupts mid-coitus, causing her pent-up feelings spill over.
Written and Directed by Shuchi Talati
Produced by Esra Saydam
Executive Produced by Kent Bassett
Co-Produced by Claire Chassagne
Cinematography by Jih-E Peng
Edited by Shuchi Talati and Kent Bassett
Production Design by Huda Haqqani
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
I grew up in a middle-class Indian home where periods were considered dirty or ‘unholy’. Women were not supposed to enter temples or kitchens while they were menstruating, lest they soil these sanctums.
In the west, periods aren’t explicitly taboo. And yet menstrual products are tucked away in back aisles, advertisements for these products shy away from showing blood, and women in cinema never get their periods. Instagram censored a photo of a fully-clothed woman in period-stained sweatpants (it was later reinstated after a backlash). This kind of omission erases our experience and casts it as something gross.
In A PERIOD PIECE I wanted to celebrate this reality of the female body, and treat sex during menstruation as something natural, even mundane. The period blood that spills over is not a source of shame for the female character. Rather, it becomes a symbol of her life-force that’s being sucked out because of this painful relationship.
A PERIOD PIECE is Chapter 1 in a six-part fiction series about sex: The Sextet. The anthology series will center and celebrate characters who are not usually seen as sexual beings in our culture. I want to depict sex with all the messiness, humor, and pathosof real-life sex. Unlike most films, where sex is simply a punctuation, in The Sextet, sex is treated as a conversation where characters’ hopes and desires are either fulfilled or dashed.
