A Home for Girls

A Home For Girls’ is a metaphor for my experience with the birth control pill. The girls represent hyper-femininity both physically and mentally induced into your being with the heightened oestrogen levels experienced. For the months I took it, I felt the most female I ever have, yet I also felt a series of emotions completely disassociated from womanhood’s beauty.

The film features three elegantly dressed teenage girls lethargically placed in different rooms of a hundred-year-old house. The house itself is representative of that depressive state of mind that I felt trapped in. The education is entirely inadequate for young women about to alter their natural hormone levels, many for the first time in their lives. My goal with this film was to break my silence on a secluded universal experience.

The house itself is bare-bones, and the film features many stripped mattresses in brightly coloured, dimly lit bedrooms. The bright colours painted on the shedding walls are the artificial glamour put on birth control and its marketing to young women. The bare mattresses can be thought of as the stripping of layers of emotion. In your most vulnerable and intimate moments, a state of mind that you welcomed now feels bare, lifeless, and used.

The girls are united throughout this film with similar expressions and positions. This highlights both the idea of this being a shared experience and finding solace in grieving our bonded obligations as one.
In the film’s final scene, I have them move in synchrony to eat a piece of cake, drink from a wine glass, and take a drag off a cigarette. Again, I was symbolizing still being young but indulging in adult vices due to the weight maturing.

A Home For Girls stays ambiguous with the period it’s set in.
The vintage style dresses, cigarette holder, and most prominent the age of the house give it a timeless sense. Women have been facing this issue since the pill was invented, yet the depressive side effects are still swept under the rug so they can hold a place in this cult-like right of passage.
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My final shot is the house’s exterior, with the light from each room casting a silhouette of the girls longingly peering out the window. This home for girls is not as beautiful as it may seem on the surface, and it is genuinely one that feels impossible to leave.