Under Wraps
1998 · 55m · Canada
Directed by Teresa MacInnes
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Travelling to eight North American cities, the film examines how menstruation, common across female mammals yet seldom discussed openly, surfaces in popular culture, hearing from Harry Finley of the Museum of Menstruation, artist Judy Chicago and writer Judy Blume.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's ready to talk about menstruation now, but MacInnes was doing this in '98 when the subject was genuinely radioactive—except she refuses the activist's megaphone and just lets the contradiction breathe: a Museum of Menstruation curator and Judy Chicago in the same frame, eight cities of cultural texture, and somehow it works without preaching.
A formally precise essay film that knows exactly where it sits in the lineage of feminist documentary inquiry—the conversational rigor of Agnès Varda, the conceptual clarity of Trinh T. Minh-ha—and the 55-minute runtime isn't indulgence but necessary space for the argument to unfold across geography and voices without rushing.
The genius move here is treating the subject neither as crisis nor celebration but as a curatorial problem: MacInnes lets eight different cities and three distinct speakers define the same phenomenon differently, and that structural choice—the decision to fragment rather than synthesize—makes the whole thing feel alive instead of settled.