Arunachalam Muruganatham
Overview
In an effort to improve feminine hygiene, a machine that creates low-cost biodegradable sanitary pads is installed in a rural village in Northern India. Using the machine, a group of local women is employed to produce and sell pads, offering them newfound independence and helping to destigmatize menstruation for all.
Cast
12 peopleReviews
4 min readThey asked the girls on camera
I have watched Period. End of Sentence. three times. Each viewing leaves me unsettled, not from the images, from the questions the film will not ask.
Twenty-six minutes of women in rural India learning to make cheap sanitary pads. Warm. Earnest.
I teared up. It won an Oscar. I still cannot clap without wondering whether the camera's framing is doing half the work.
The film opens on young girls. Someone asks, "What is a period?" The answers stall.
One girl giggles and covers her face. Another says, "I don't know. I've heard of it."
The camera stays on that discomfort until the taboo feels physical. Shame against knowledge. Silence against a thing you can hold.
The scene works. That is the trouble.
Activists later said the filmmakers engineered that beat. Adolescent girls, a co-ed classroom, a question built to manufacture embarrassment for a Western audience. The charge was serious enough to spark a petition to rescind the Oscar.
If it holds, the film's most famous moment is not observed. It is staged. I cannot take that scene as fly-on-the-wall anymore.
The temperature of everything after it drops.
We meet the women of Hapur, a village outside Delhi, where menstruation is treated as a dirty secret. Girls leave school when they start bleeding. Women use rags, ash, even sand, and they risk infection and humiliation for it.
Then a machine arrives. Arunachalam Muruganantham, the so-called "Pad Man" of India, invented a cheap pad-maker. The women learn it, produce pads, sell them to neighbors.
Audience Opinions
Audience 7.6/10
"An eye-opening and emotionally resonant short documentary that destigmatizes menstruation through authentic grassroots storytelling."
The film is praised for its powerful focus on women gaining dignity, autonomy, and income through low-cost pad production, turning a taboo subject into an inspiring story of empowerment. Viewers found it both educational and moving, with several calling out specific scenes as shocking or tear-inducing in how frankly they depict stigma and change. latestnetflix.com's view is that Criticism centers on the brief runtime, which keeps the piece from probing systemic issues in more depth, and on dubbing choices that occasionally pull attention away from the subjects themselves.
What viewers praise
- Powerful empowering message Shows how something as basic as access to sanitary pads can transform girls' education, work opportunities, and sense of self-worth.
- Eye-opening cultural insight Reveals how menstruation is treated as a heavy taboo, contrasting those attitudes with viewers’ own experiences and making the situation in rural India feel immediate and real.
- Genuinely emotional impact Moments like women seeing or using pads for the first time and speaking openly about shame and restriction are described as moving and even tear-jerking.
- Earnest, feel-good tone Despite tackling discrimination, the film comes across as uplifting and hopeful, with a sincere belief in grassroots change rather than feeling manipulative.
Common complaints
- Too short for depth The roughly half-hour length leaves some viewers wanting a deeper dive into the broader systemic and political causes of menstrual inequity.
- Dubbing feels distracting The decision to dub the subjects over their own voices takes some viewers out of the story and feels unnecessary for a documentary.
- Less hard-hitting than expected Those expecting a more investigative or critical approach to the underlying structures behind period poverty felt the treatment was somewhat light and surface-level.
Recommended for
Social issue documentary fans Women’s empowerment stories Educational classroom use Short documentary enthusiasts Human rights and justice themes
Full Plot (Spoilers)
Spoiler warning
This section contains the full plot, including major story reveals. Overview above stays spoiler-free.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsShe told the Oscars she was not crying because she was on her period.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wap5W4v_B_g
Awkwafina and John Mulaney opened the envelope at the Dolby Theatre on February 24, 2019. The statue went to Period. End of Sentence. Rayka Zehtabchi, 25, stepped up with producer Melissa Berton and six other people from the team. "I'm not crying because I'm on my period or anything," she said. "I can't believe a film about menstruation just won an Oscar." She thanked Netflix for the platform, her editor and partner Sam Davis, Lisa Taback, Garrett Schiff, Guneet Monga, and the women of Kathikhera. Berton closed with the line the campaign had already been using. latestnetflix.com's view is that "A period should end a sentence, not a girl's education."Reese Witherspoon quoted it the next morning. 
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Bake sales bought the machine. The village named the brand Fly.
The Pad Project's page is blunt about the origin. Oakwood School students in Los Angeles raised more than $55,000 through fundraisers, bake sales, and two Kickstarter campaigns to buy a sanitary pad machine for Kathikhera, a village outside New Delhi in Hapur district. They partnered with Zehtabchi and Action India. The women on camera learn to run the machine, sell pads, and push against a taboo that had kept girls out of class. They named the brand Fly because they wanted women to soar. The Hindi short follows that shop floor. Arunachalam Muruganantham, the Coimbatore inventor of the low-cost pad machine, appears. Netflix put the film up in February 2019 after a festival run that started at Cleveland on April 5, 2018. TMDB lists Zehtabchi as director and a 26 minute documentary. , ,
Who got the statue, and who stayed off the stage.
The Academy's official winners were Zehtabchi and Berton. Monga produced through Sikhya Entertainment, the banner behind The Lunchbox. She tweeted "WE WON!!!" and told The Hollywood Reporter, "Now that we won the Oscar, let's go change the world!" A Print column treated the seating chart as the story. It called the win another Slumdog moment, an Indian subject shepherded by an Iranian-American director and an American teacher, with Monga "the very Indian and the very able" producer who "didn't even get to make it to the stage with the acceptance team." That is an argument about credit, not a claim that the Academy listed her as a winner and then hid the card. The Academy named two winners. She was in the thank-yous. The rumor mill still treated the missing walk as the gossip. , ,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrm2pD0qofM
There was a nastier whisper before the envelope. India Today repeated an anonymous male Academy voter who told The Hollywood Reporter he was not voting for the film because menstruation was "icky for men." Then it won. Netflix still streams the short. The studio also posted the full feature on YouTube. The women in Kathikhera kept making Fly pads. The gossip desks kept arguing about who got to stand under the statue. , , ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.