Period Piece
By Jay Rosenblatt & Jennifer Frame

This documentary celebrates menarche, the first menstrual period, a fundamental experience in every girl's life. Women aged eight to eighty-four, and from diverse cultural backgrounds, tell their first menstruation stories with candor and humor. Their poignant recollections reveal their feelings about womanhood, family dynamics, and society's complicated attitudes toward menstruation. The film addresses the pain many girls experience as they negotiated new relationships with their own bodies and with their culture. Throughout the video, clips from "hygiene" films of the 1950's are revisited in new ways, adding humor and historical perspective to this very entertaining and thought-provoking film about a topic long considered taboo. Period Piece will be an invaluable media resource for use in counseling, school nursing, health and sex education, and in courses in women's studies, sociology, and psychology.

30 minutes
© 1996
Purchase $199 DVD
Order No. QA-179

Reviews
"Enormously useful for parents, teachers and health professionals. Likely to provoke productive discussions in Women's Studies, Anthropology, and Psychology courses about the ways in which women's developmental issues are shaped by cultural contexts." Joan Liem, PhD, University of Massachusetts

"Rueful, touching, comic and illuminating, this film shows that menstruation affects different women in vastly different ways."Mopsy S. Kennedy, LICSW, LMFT, The Family Center

Awards & Conference Screenings
Gold, National Health Information Awards
Bronze Apple, National Educational Media Network
National Council on Family Relations
Big Muddy Film Festival

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To rent or purchase this film, please visit the Icarus Films website

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