Kenyon student’s film up for Oscar
Most Sunday evenings, Ruby Schiff works on homework or hangs out with her friends.
This Sunday, her essays will have to wait.
Schiff, a 19-year-old sophomore at Kenyon College in Gambier, will spend her evening at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, where the documentary she coproduced is up for the Best Documentary Short Subject award.
The film, “Period. End of Sentence.”, follows several women in the small village of Kathikera, India, as they start a small business producing feminine pads in a part of the world where discussing menstruation is mostly taboo.
Schiff created the film with a few friends during her senior year of high school at Oakwood School in the North Hollywood section of Los Angeles after she, two close friends and their mothers traveled to the United Nations to attend a session of the Commission on the Status of Women.
There, they first learned of Arunachalam Muruganantham, an Indian man who invented a lowcost machine to make sanitary napkins. They also discovered that many
women around the world drop out of school once they get their period since they don’t have access to pads.
“We were dumbstruck,” Schiff said. “It seems like a simple issue that has a simple solution. We started talking about it with our community, and the more we talked about it, the more we realized a lot of people didn’t know about this issue.”
Determined to do something, Schiff and her friends founded The Pad Project, now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, to raise awareness of the issue and funding to buy pad machines for Indian women.
Bake sales ensued, as did donation-based yoga classes in Schiff’s yard. The students also created an online campaign via Kickstarter, raising more than $45,000 to send a pad-making machine and a year’s worth of supplies to Kathikera, as well as a film crew to document the process.
When Schiff approached her father, Garrett — a screenwriter and producer — about finding filmmakers to help with the project, he wasted no time combing through his connections. He asked director Rayka Zehtabchi and cinematographer Sam Davis, both recent graduates from the film program at the University of Southern California, to join, and both signed on without hesitation, he said.
Zehtabchi and Davis traveled twice to India, first as the machine was being installed and another trip six months later to witness the economic independence the women had created for themselves.
The documentary, available on Netflix, features a distinct lack of Western perspective, aside from the English translation of the Indian speakers. Not one of the Americans involved Ruby Schiff make an appearance, save for the credits, and the skeleton crew included mostly Indian filmmakers to be as unobtrusive as possible.
“That was very intentional,” Schiff said. “We very very aware from the beginning that the original group of students all happen to be white women from Los Angeles and with that comes inherent privilege. It was really important for us to acknowledge that privilege and also learn how to best use it. It’s one thing to drop a pad machine in a village or write a check, and it’s another to communicate with these people, working together to best suit their needs.”
Schiff’s father spoke with pride of his daughter’s thoughtful distribution of resources. He is her date to the award ceremony, at which she will wear her high-school prom dress and put the savings toward future pad machines.
“A lot of people might have given up, but they were very committed and devoted and are incredibly passionate,” he said of his daughter and her friends. “They’re literally changing the conversation about it.”
Misha Rai, a fellow with Kenyon arts organization the Kenyon Review and who is Indian, worked with her home country's Ministry of Women and Child Development to educate girls in rural India about periods. She saw firsthand the power of storytelling to dispel embarrassment and social taboos, often using the anecdote of her first period to connect.
“I always make it into this funny, warm story, and it makes them laugh, and they ask questions afterward,” she said. “Story has power. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen story change people's lives, and I’m really hoping this story ("Period. End of Sentence.") does that.”
Rai, who participated on a panel on the documentary Tuesday at Kenyon, rarely watches the Oscars anymore but plans to root hard for the documentary.
Win or lose, though, Schiff is already more than gratified.
“When we first started this project, it definitely never crossed any of our minds,” she said of the nomination. “We identified an issue and we wanted to find a solution, and it just kind of gained traction and we stuck with it, and that’s how we ended up here.”