The heartbreaking humiliation of period poverty

Produced by Dog Eat Dog, Absent opens with a young girl frantically searching for, and failing to find, sanitary products while getting ready for school. 

It then follows her agonising journey on the school bus during which a sympathetic male fellow student alerts her to the stain on the back of her trousers. The girl’s unspoken shame and the boy’s awkwardness deftly convey the fact that issues around periods remain hushed-up and under-reported. 

It's a subtle portrait of austerity Britain – the girl's mother must work double shifts to pay the bills but still can't stretch to buying tampons, meaning her daughter must often be absent from school when she's on her period. 

It closes with two staggering statistics: 49 percent of girls in the UK have had to miss school due to their periods; while 40 percent have had to use toilet roll because they couldn’t afford proper menstrual products.  

The film was written by Lucy MacCarthy for Freedom4Girls, an organisation challenging the stigmas, taboos and gender inequalities associated with menstruation.