About Bloody Time!
2020 · 8m · New Zealand
Directed by Rachel Judkins
Genres: comedy, documentary
Tones: humorous, provocative
After some 300 periods, Rachel Judkins sets out before her 40th birthday to shed the shame around menstruation and find something worth celebrating.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's suddenly comfortable talking about periods now, which means this could've been toothless—but Judkins' gambit of turning 300 menstruations into a personal reckoning is genuinely weird enough to work, a premise that makes you sit up and ask how she's going to pull this off.
There's a lineage here—the personal essay documentary, the feminist reclamation project—and Judkins executes with formal precision, building a cumulative argument through humor and specificity that situates itself squarely in the contemporary essay film tradition.
The decision to count out loud—to make the sheer *quantity* of periods the emotional core rather than abstract politics—is the masterstroke; it's a small choice with an 8-minute budget that transforms a potentially preachy premise into something genuinely moving and absurd at once.