Filmmaker Tatum Lenberg Aims To Make Menstruation Mainstream With Short Film ‘Go With The Flow’

Female driven, written, and starring comedies are coming into the forefront and it’s about time. Stories created by us on issues we’ve grown up with and face every day are needed in film and television. Filmmaker Tatum Lenberg is using her platform to create narratives about women that are often thought to be taboo; case in point menstruation.

The month of October celebrated the very first National Period Day and Saturday Night Live even poked fun at the absurdity of even being seen with a tampon in public, so Lenberg’s comedic short film “Go with the Flow” is right on time for public consumption.

Realizing from an early age that she’s rather be behind the camera directing and creating the stories instead of in front performing them, the San Francisco Bay area native came up with the idea of her short from a cluster of vagina jokes. “Go with the Flow” depicts a complicated mother-daughter relationship when preteen Mary (Gigi Cesare) gets her first period and seeks aid from her method actress mom Tammy (Jodie Fleming).

“I  just thought the concept would be so funny of having a mother who’s a method actor just cause I’ve been doing so for the past couple of years. I’ve worked with actors with all different acting techniques and I think the concept of not just a method actor but someone in the supervisor role or a mentor, or a mother in this case, you can never know what you’re going to expect from them because each day or every audition is a different character,” Tatum said.

Photo: “Go With The Flow” still

“I also think it’s so important to me to highlight the mother-daughter relationship. It is a comedy and you do get to laugh at the mom Tammy as she goes on her ridiculous trials and fails as a method actor, but in the long run, as ridiculous as it sounds, she is pursuing acting to support her family and to support her daughter, so in her own backwards way she is doing everything out of love for Mary. You do see that with our sweet ending that wraps it up together.”

Tatum further elaborates on why she wanted to add the element of menstruation to her short. “At the time I just haven’t seen periods represented on the big screen from my personal experience. I love writing female-driven stories. I was raised by a single mother and I love my mom, so the mother-daughter relationship really speaks to me. I knew I wanted to do a comedy because when periods are portrayed in film they’re from the point of view of the dad. The dad somehow gets left with his daughter and doesn’t know what to do. It’s always really dramatic and it’s not like that, at least in my personal experience. I think you can come out of it from a comedic side. You see all these male comedies making fart jokes all the time and people think that’s so funny. So I’m like, why can’t we make period jokes?”

It truly is bizarre how periods are still a hushed subject let alone have an entire film centered around it, but Tatum didn’t have any worries about putting the subject in a film. “I wouldn’t say [I] necessarily [had] apprehensions except we did know that the audience for this film would probably be more of a female audience. We’ve shown it at a couple of screenings and the people who were cracking up the loudest were men. So I think honestly it ended up appealing to a lot more people than we thought it would.” Tatum hopes her short film will create a bigger opportunity for stories like these to be told. She wants menstruation to be a subject that can be talked and joked about in the way men can talk and joke about personal things they go through.

Photo: ‘Go with the Flow’ still

Up next Tatum is working on a female driven feature film comedy that she can’t say too much about but teases that it’s a blend of “Mean Girls” meets ‘Happy Gilmore.” Stay in the loop with all the projects coming up for Tatum and how you can see “Go with the Flow” by visiting her website at TatumLenberg.com and following her on social @TatumLenberg on Instagram.

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