Breaking the Cycle: Menstrual Taboos, Myths and Reality

This is the second of our quarterly events for the 2018 The Homeless Period Project + Birds Fly South: No Girl Left Behind school campaign. There are 144 Title 1 middle and high schools in South Carolina. Our total annual goal is to make 10k packs.

The June 14th event will include a period pack party and a special screening of three episodes from the new documentary, “Breaking the Cycle: Menstrual Taboos, Myths and Reality.” Donations of individually wrapped pads, liners, and wipes is greatly appreciated!

The Homeless PERIOD Project is excited to announce we are a part of a documentary series, Breaking the Cycle: Menstrual Taboos, Myths and Reality.  We have been in discussions, planning and Skype meetings over the last 9 months.  The director, Nancy Durrell McKenna, is the founder and director of SafeHands and the film is being produced by Deborah Bayer Marlow of MarlowFilms (http://www.marlowfilm.dk). The objective of the film is to hear the voices of individuals from 7 different countries (girls, boys, men and women) from varying cultures, addressing a different aspect of the challenges surrounding menstruation in their culture or experience. Through their stories viewers will be made aware of the taboos, cultural issues and/or celebrations around menstruation that have an effect on lives around the world.

The film will be presented in episodic format, as “chapters”. Each chapter will be approximately 7-10 minutes long, and will be a character driven story about an individual sharing a different issue or challenge about menstruation in her specific culture or circumstance. It is their hope to produce 7 chapters of different countries, with the view in mind to edit some or all chapters together into a full feature documentary for worldwide distribution. They believe an episodic format is palatable for educational bodies to screen in classes; flexible for use online; usable as an editorial source; for screening at short doc festivals; to stream as stand-alone pieces or edited as a full feature, and therefore, viable and culturally relevant.

The films are produced through funding cooperation with Safe Hands for Mothers. You can see the first three chapters here:http://www.safehands.org/reproductive-health-1/

*This is direct link to our episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–lwrloJljs&sns=em )

They have three completed now: The Dipo Ceremony, Banished for Bleeding and Restoring Dignity.  The HPP is part of the third chapter/episode!  The women from Marlow Films traveled to the US this past March to film.

We hope you will take a minute to view our episode Restoring Dignity: One Period at a Time.