_{Hormonal by Pien van Grinsven}

Women have long been seen as unreliable narrators of stories about their own bodies. Often at a very young age, women start taking hormones that have a profound effect on fertility, but also on mood, digestion, sexuality, stress response and partner selection. These experiences have long been sidelined. The hybrid film Hormonal by Dutch Pien van Grinsven seeks to change that by visualizing real stories through dance scenes, collaborating with prize-winning Dutch physical theatre creator Bodine Sutorius.

Three women from different backgrounds share their real-life experiences that illustrate the many ways hormones can affect our lives - both in a negative and positive sense. Birth control may have a been marvel in offering “unprecedented independence” and liberating woman from pain and discomfort, but oftentimes medical practitioners have sidelined the changes to mood, sleep patterns, digestion, sexuality and stress response, and the overall feelings of darkness, lethargy and “weight” that users can experience.

In Hormonal we hear personal testimony on the subject, but we don't see the women. Their words are illustrated instead via dance, performed (quite remarkably) by actor/dancer Bodine Sutorius in the most quotidian of locations - the toilet, the bedroom, the GP surgery, even the supermarket. The experiences that are shared are different: where one woman feels more stable and constant with hormones, the other loses her sense of self. “Their stories are re-embodied in a space where what is inside becomes visible on the outside,” says Van Grinsven. The dancer/actor also plays a lecturer who explains the science both to us, the film audience, and to a roomful of students, played also by Sutorius.

Throughout the film, these women’s words are interpreted via the medium of dance, whether it be a moment of agony or depression when Sutorius drops like a stone, or the slow immersion out of acute discomfort as the dancer observes life returning to her limbs, hands and toes.

The subject of hormonal birth control has particular resonance for Van Grinsven. She had been taking the treatment since she was 15, but had always felt, she explains, like a “heavy” person. “I always felt kind of depressed - it was hard to keep my spirits up. I just thought, okay, maybe that's who I am. Maybe, you know, some people always have this kind of extra weight on their shoulders, and I happened to be one of those people.”

During a particularly dark spell, she wanted to at least rule out the possibility that her birth control played a role. So she took out her IUD. “I think, within a matter of weeks, these intensely dark thoughts disappeared. In the months that followed, I got to know a fundamentally lighter version of myself. It’s not like all of a sudden my life was just perfect and I was walking on clouds. But it was almost like the baseline of how I felt had lifted in its entirety.”

Yes, hormonal birth control delivered great freedom and independence within both societal and political spheres, but the world has moved on whereby its efficacy as a health beneficiary can be questioned, Van Grinsven argues. What can make life better for one person, can be destructive for someone else. “We are at the point where we can be critical about what it does to us, where we can say, okay, now it's time for the next step, to find another solution. Now we're ready to face these problems. I think the uncomfortable thing was that there was only going to be a solution if there was a perceived problem. And I think for a long time there was just no perceived problem.”

The film will be broadcast on the Dutch station BNNVARA on World Contraception Day (September 26), and Van Grinsven will be using her fee to fund an impact campaign around the film, together with the Amsterdam-based start-up impact initiative Club Collective.

“It's proven to be tricky,” the director concedes of designing an impact campaign around a problem for which medical science is yet to find an adequate solution. “We can only say there's a problem. But there is no solution. And many organizations feel that it is tricky to make a noise about the problem until we can offer a solution. Which is understandable, but at the same time, the solution will not come unless we say there's a problem.”

Hormonal is produced by Korrel Film. It is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund.
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