SHOWS OF THE WEEK: Pandora’s Box (March 8, Vimeo, iTunes, GooglePlay and more); Underplayed (March 8, Crave)
sewing menstrual kits for girls. PHOTO CREDIT: IR Films
If you’re female, female-identifying or just have a well developed sense of fairness, these two documentaries may enrage you. But, for me, there was also exhilaration — that women are taking steps to right historic wrongs, not sitting around waiting for someone, i.e. men, to do it for them.
Did you know that in the state of Texas you won’t have to pay tax on a cowboy hat, but you’ll be taxed on menstrual projects? How bloody ridiculous is that?
That kind of dissonance — and the general shame and stigmatization heaped on half the world’s population for something that’s part of their biology — is the subject of “Pandora’s Box: Lifting the Lid on Menstruation,” written and directed by Canadian Rebecca Snow.
It makes the case that “period poverty,” the inability of women and girls (or anyone of any gender identity who bleeds) to access menstrual products, is a question of human rights, not just an inconvenience. And it’s something that can have serious consequences, keeping girls out of school — not just in developing countries like Kenya and India but in poor parts of so-called first world nations.
Part of the battle is getting menstruation talked about openly and not treated as something dirty that women have to hide — a tall order when there are still places where women are required to shut themselves away when they are menstruating and when 60 per cent of girls, as per UNICEF, don’t even know what a period is before they get one. One of the saddest parts of the doc for me concerned Hellen, a bright Kenyan teen who wanted to be a teacher but stopped going to school because her family could only afford pads for one daughter and she was too embarrassed about the possibility of bleeding in class.
There are good parts, too. Thanks to the work of the Period Equity project, 20 American states have stopped taxing period products. Britain abolished the “tampon tax” in January (in Canada, the GST was removed from menstrual products in 2015). Organizations like Days for Girls, Safe N’ Happy Periods, the Myna Mahila Foundation, the Red Box Project and Ladies of Hope Ministries, to name ones highlighted in the doc, are getting period products directly to women and girls and/or educating them about menstruation. But as the doc states, “The fight for menstrual equity continues.”
The subject matter of “Underplayed” is not as universal but no less stirring. It concerns the dearth of women in the electronic music industry.
Female pioneers (think Delia Derbyshire, Clara Rockmore, Wendy Carlos or Daphne Oram) are not well known; women comprised just 8 per cent of the solo acts at EDM festivals in 2019; women who do break through, like Canada’s Rezz, Australia’s Nervo and Alison Wonderland, and American Tokimonsta, get paid less than men and have to endure implicit and overt sexism, including vicious social media posts.
And yet the impulse to create endures, despite the obstacles.
I was cheered by vignettes like Rezz performing at the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre; the twin sisters of Nervo cheerfully bringing along their babies to gigs; Alison Wonderland sharing the stage with an all-female group of musicians; and queer Jamaican-American DJ TYGAPAW defying poverty and the patriarchal attitudes they grew up with to make their music.
And all of these artists, along with others highlighted in the doc, are teaching and inspiring young girls and women.
Electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani says she thought that women in the industry were “done, gone, finished, lost,” but with this new crop of women, “we’re on the crest of a big wave.” Long may it roll on.
I have one more program to draw your attention to, also debuting on March 8, International Women’s Day. “Secret of the Missing Princess” (BBC Select) examines the disturbing case of Princess Latifa, daughter of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and vice-president of the United Arab Emirates. Latifa hasn’t been seen since February 2018 when she was captured during an escape attempt, on a boat in international waters, and taken back to Dubai. In a video she recorded before her flight, posted seven days after she was taken, Latifa described both the escape and recapture of her sister Shamsa in 2000 in England, an offence against British law for which the UAE was never held accountable, and her own first attempt to flee in 2002, after which Latifa said she was held in solitary confinement and tortured for more than three years. Her disappearance has raised grave concerns for her welfare in a place where women have no rights and are essentially considered the property of men. “If you are watching this video either I’m dead or I’m in a very, very bad situation,” Latifa says.
63 Up (March 9, BritBox)
in the documentary “63 Up.” PHOTO CREDIT: BritBox
There’s an added poignancy to this instalment in the “Up” series, which has followed its 14 subjects since 1964, beginning at the age of 7 and every seven years after. The death of filmmaker Michael Apted in January means this is the final chapter.
The 12 people who participated in “63 Up” — one woman, Suzy, declined; another, Lynn, died — will go on, or not, but we’ll no longer have a window into the twists and turns of their lives.
They’ve been ordinary lives on the evidence of the films, which seem to be the most extraordinary thing that’s happened to them, turning them into minor celebrities according to cab driver Tony, who wanted to be a jockey when he was 7.
Only two of the 14 ended up with the careers they envisioned as kids: upper crust lads Andrew and John, who became a solicitor and barrister, respectively.
Yet, overall they’ve lived lives of satisfaction despite the disappointments. All 14 married, some more than once; many take great pride in children and grandchildren. Others have found ways to compensate for career shortcomings: Tony with occasional acting jobs; Jackie in late-life closeness with her sister; Paul as a foster parent; Peter in his rock band and the novel he’s writing.
Even Neil, who seems to have had the roughest time, battling homelessness as a young man and ongoing depression, has found peace in his work as a municipal politician and in his church.
Apted began the project as a commentary on Britain’s class system but ended up with a treatise on the human condition. In their paths to futures that they never imagined at 7, the “Up” participants are individual but also universal. They are all of us.
100 Years From Home/What Will Become of Us (March 9, 8 and 9:30 p.m., PBS)
If you’re not clear what the Armenian Genocide is or why it’s still a topic of conversation nearly 106 years after it began, these two documentaries will give you an understanding.
It was the extermination between 1915 and ’23 of as many as 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children by the Ottoman Empire in an area that is now part of Turkey. Those who weren’t killed outright were subject to rape, starvation, torture and displacement.
Obviously it had enormous psychic repercussions not just for those who were there but for their descendants.
In “100 Years From Home,” production designer Lilit Pilikian, whose parents were born in what remains of Armenia, becomes the first member of her family to return to Kars, Turkey — which was part of Western Armenia before the genocide — since her great-grandparents fled the city in 1920.
The journey is fraught, not just with the emotion stirred up by the genocide but with fear, since Lilit is an Armenian in Turkey (which continues to deny the genocide happened) searching for her family’s former home.
“I didn’t expect to be so angry,” says Lilit, who at the beginning of the doc (directed by her non-Armenian husband, Jared White) describes herself as not feeling Armenian enough.
I won’t tell you whether she found the house, the blueprints of which have been passed down through her family since 1897, but she definitely found a sense of identity.
“What Will Become of Us” is concerned not just with the repercussions of the genocide but with future generations moving out of its shadow while also retaining a sense of Armenian identity.
Among those we meet is survivor Asdghig Tetezian Alemian, who was 108 at the time of the interview. Her father was among the first group of men killed in 1915. Asdghig recalls her mother digging graves with her hands for her two brothers, who were 2 and 6 when they died, and says sorrowfully, “I don’t know what happened to my mother.”
Her granddaughter, Karine Shamlian, says descendants of Asdghig and others like her have a responsibility to “not let it have been in vain.”
The rest of the doc explores how those descendants are trying to keep their culture alive in America, including people like musician Sebu Simonian of the band Capital Cities; comedian and actor Lory Tatoulian; Andrew Hagopian, who is learning traditional music from his grandfather, oud master Richard Hagopian; and designer Michael Aram Wolohojian, who created a New York City sculpture to honour Armenians who migrated after the genocide.
Meanwhile, we see Aram Hamparian of the Armenian National Committee of America working to have the United States recognize the genocide, something that finally happened in 2019, after the doc was made.
As long as Turkey refuses to acknowledge the genocide, however, it will remain an open wound for Armenians.
Genera+ion (March 11, Crave)
Your appreciation of this HBO Max drama might depend on what side of the generational divide you stand. Like other teen-focused dramas — I’m thinking “Euphoria” and “We Are Who We Are” as examples — it portrays youth as intelligent and self-aware but also cynical and sometimes behaving against their own best interests.
In the series, created by gay writer-director Daniel Barnz and his bisexual teenage daughter Zelda, and executive-produced by Lena Dunham (“Girls”), a diverse group of kids are fumbling their way through life and love while the adults around them, even kind-of-cool guidance counsellor Sam (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), come off as clueless and ineffectual.
Chester, played by out gay actor Justice Smith, is the most compelling of the group. He’s clearly smart as hell but pretends not to care about anything, including whether the repeated dress code violations spurred by his gender-non-conforming outfits will get him kicked out of school.
Nathan (Uly Schlesinger) is coming to terms with his bisexuality, which his Christian mother (Martha Plimpton) is doing her best to ignore, while his twin Naomi (Chloe East) is eager to gain heterosexual experience. Then there’s her friend Arianna (Nathanya Alexander), who’s attracted to Nathan but has experimented with girls, and who likes to shock people with her homophobic jokes even though she has two gay dads.
Riley (Chase Sui Wonders) seems to be straight, but there’s an undercurrent to her connection with Greta (Haley Sanchez), who’s lesbian and smitten with Riley.
In the four episodes I saw, the kids drank, smoked weed, made out, and shared many, many texts and Instagram posts, including a full-frontal dick pic.
The question for me was whether the series was building toward anything in particular aside from who might end up sleeping with whom. But perhaps, as the character of Delilah (Lukita Maxwell) complains about the school’s teaching materials, that’s too binary a way to look at it.
“Genera+ion” may not speak to me personally but, with its focus on racially and sexually diverse characters it still has something to say.
Odds and Ends
CBC’s “Nature of Things” has “The Last Walrus” (March 12, 9 p.m., also CBC Gem) as its season finale. The doc by Nathalie Bibeau examines the debate around keeping marine mammals in captivity in places like Niagara Falls’ Marineland and the Vancouver Aquarium. The title comes from the last adult walrus remaining at Marineland.
CBC Gem has the Canadian debut of “Bad Banks” (March 12), a German-Luxembourg drama about a woman thrust into the corrupt world of high finance at an investment bank.
Netflix has “Marriage or Mortgage” (March 10), a series that blends wedding and real estate reality TV in a “Love It or List It”-type structure. But instead of deciding whether to sell or renovate a house, young couples have to decide whether to spend their cash on a wedding bash or a down payment on a home. Real estate agent Nichole Holmes and wedding planner Sarah Miller are the ones doing the convincing. Netflix also has “Yes Day” (March 12), a comedy film produced by and starring Jennifer Garner in which a couple decides to say yes to whatever their kids want to do for 24 hours.
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