A PERIOD PIECE
DIRECTED BY SCHUCHI TALATI
UNITED STATES // 2020
12 mins
Geetha 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.
Reflective Encounters
“A stain is just a stain unless it’s blood imprinting the mark of an extramarital affair onto Geetha’s untarnished couch. A flustered man, his heavy thrusts on top of her tense body, the smudges that don’t seem to come off: all of these details paint a disquieting picture of an otherwise banal situation. Within the carefully constructed setting of Geetha’s orderly apartment, Vehd’s slightly neurotic presence feels like a thorn in the eye: once the fading lights recede from the room’s shadowy corners, the playful gestures seem to have soured.
When the two meet, there is a carnival of smiles, sighs, and trembling voices dancing around the various furniture: the sofa, the chairs, the bookshelf. With a hesitant invite on behalf of her (“Are you gonna come...in?”), Vehd takes a determined step in and he is now inside: surrounded by her microcosmos and is asked to embrace it. By contrasting the initial tenderness of the film’s opening, director Shuchi Talati lures the viewer in a world of fading lights receding for shadows to grow, of camera swoons until it can do so no longer, of bodies entwining but only to part.”
— Savina Petkova
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. It was also very important for me to have South Asian characters who are not defined by their South Asianness; who didn’t have to become stand-ins for their communities.
I wanted to allow them their full range of humanity: to be in love, experience heartbreak and loss, and represent only themselves, not their full community. Because this is how their stories will also be universal—a luxury mostly reserved for characters from dominant cultures.
Filmmaker Bio
Shuchi Talati is a filmmaker from India whose work challenges dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, race and South Asian identity. Her most recent short film, A Period Piece, about an afternoon of period sex, was selected for SXSW 2020.
Shuchi is in development for her first feature, Girls Will Be Girls, a sexual awakening film set in a conservative boarding school in India. Girls has been selected for Berlinale Script Station, Jerusalem Film Lab, Cine Qua Non Script Lab, Film Bazaar Co-Production Market, and is fiscally sponsored by Women Make Movies.
Shuchi’s work has also been recognized by Berlinale Talents, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Women in Film endowment, and Région Île-de-France.
Shuchi is also a writer / producer for documentaries. Recent credits include We Are: Brooklyn Saints for Netflix, and Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas for HBO, which interrogated policing in communities of color and where one of Shuchi's episodes was nominated for a GLAAD award.
She is a graduate of the American Film Institute. She lives and works in NYC where she co-chairs the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective.