Oscar win for first-year's documentary

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A few days before most first-years took off for spring break, Sophie Ascheim ’22 (back row, center, in photo at left)flew across the country for another kind of adventure: taking the stage to accept an Academy Award as one of the executive producers of Period. End of Sentence. The film won the Oscar for best short documentary.  

In high school in California, Ascheim and her classmates in Melissa Berton’s English class had raised money to buy a machine that makes sanitary pads and install it in Kathikhera, India, where many women can’t afford menstrual supplies. Berton and six of her students, including Ascheim, traveled to India with director Rayka Zehtabchi to make a film about a group of women there learning to use the machine. The pads are sold to women at low cost.

Ascheim is delighted about the film’s impact. “It widened the conversation about menstruation in that community and neighboring regions,” she says. Don’t go looking for a golden statuette in her room in Old Campus, though. “We don’t all get our own Oscars,” she explains. “We got two—one for our director and one for Melissa.”