The Cinetopia Film Festival returned to Ann Arbor this May, bringing the best of independent film with it. While this year’s entire program was a standout, opening night was especially notable. Cinetopia 2025 opened with a screening of the film “Lady Parts,” followed by a Q&A session with the film’s director Nancy Boyd and producer Meghan Griesbeck.
As the name suggests, “Lady Parts” is about vaginas. Sorry, is that too crass? I could tell you that “Lady Parts” is about female anatomy or genital health. That might be less awkward for everyone. But that wouldn’t be fair to the film. The primary goal of “Lady Parts” is to destigmatize vaginal health, as Boyd shared during the post-screening Q&A. So I will be true to that intention, and I will tell you that “Lady Parts” is about vaginas.
More specifically, “Lady Parts” is about screenwriter Bonnie Gross’ vagina. Diagnosed with vulvar vestibulitis and vaginismus in her early 20s, Gross was forced to put her life on pause for almost a year in order to undergo a vulvar vestibulectomy — a surgery that promised to relieve her chronic vaginal pain. The surgery also forced Gross to put her filmmaking dreams on pause, move back in with her parents and commit to six weeks of bed rest. It was during this healing process that “Lady Parts” first took shape.
While on bed rest, Gross wrote a blog post sharing her experience. She was met with an outpouring of support, having heard from many others who experienced similar vaginal pain. Gross began to realize that the stigma around vaginal health was so severe that many people lived their entire lives in pain because they were too ashamed to bring up the subject (or even utter the word “vagina”). Gross became determined to help break that stigma. “Lady Parts” is the final result of her efforts: a scrappy, vagina-centric feminist indie film dedicated to normalizing discussions of vaginal health and encouraging others to seek care.
The film opens with a mother and her young daughter standing together in a bathroom stall, with the camera sitting outside the door. All we can see are two pairs of feet. There’s the sound of something unwrapping, and a murmur of instructions from the mother.
For anyone lucky enough to have been guided through their first period, it’s a familiar scene: We’re watching a mother teach her daughter how to use a tampon. Even from outside the bathroom stall, the discomfort this girl is experiencing is clear. So is the shame. Her hushed voice, her mother’s insistence, the anonymous segmented view the camera provides — this is clearly an uncomfortable experience. But the little girl does what we’ve all been taught to do. She swallows the discomfort and uses the tampon.
“Lady Parts” spends the rest of its runtime dismantling this notion of shame and unspoken pain. The film jumps forward in time and reintroduces us to the little girl as a bright-eyed young adult named Paige (Valentina Tammaro, “Story Ave”). Freshly graduated from college and anxious to get her life started, Paige lives in Los Angeles and works a high-stress job in the entertainment industry. She is also plagued by vaginal pain. We learn that the discomfort she expressed in the film’s opening scene wasn’t just the usual discomfort felt when first using a tampon — it is a severe, overwhelming pain that Paige has struggled with for her entire life. Although she tries to ignore it as much as possible, it’s begun to seriously affect her confidence and happiness. After a particularly painful sexual encounter, Paige finally forces herself to go to the doctor.
What follows is a semi-autobiographical recounting of Gross’ own experience. Paige is diagnosed with vulvar vestibulitis and vaginismus and moves home to Philadelphia to undergo surgery. While certain narrative liberties are taken in telling Paige’s story (there are higher career stakes, some more romantic tension and a couple of fabricated characters), “Lady Parts” is for the most part a gently fictionalized recounting of Gross’ own experience.
Boyd’s precise directorial style helps to emphasize the more brutal elements of vaginal pain. We’re given a firsthand look at every second of Paige’s discomfort — whether that comes during sex, surgery or recovery. During the Q&A session following the screening, Boyd explained she chose to frame Paige unevenly during moments of vaginal pain to more fully illustrate the isolation and shame vaginitis and vaginismus can cause. Thanks to Boyd’s attention, whenever Paige feels trapped or alone in her experience, she also clearly appears that way on screen, often framed far to the left or right of center. This framing allows audiences to easily empathize with Paige — whenever she feels uncomfortable, we do too. Boyd’s attentive portrayal of Paige is enhanced by Tammaro’s excellent performance. She brings an earnestness and warmth to Paige that makes it impossible not to root for her. She’s also got a sharp sense of humor, easily maintaining her self-deprecating wit during the film’s harder moments.
As the film progresses, Paige’s recovery is bolstered by the support of her parents. Her bond with her mother (Amy Lyndon, “Amor en toda la cara”) is particularly strong. Over the course of the film, both women learn to dismantle their shame surrounding vaginal health. In an early scene in the film, Paige and her parents struggle to discuss her imminent surgery. By the end of the film, “vagina” is thrown around easily at their dinner table. As the credits rolled, the tension seemed to be broken not only for Paige and her family, but also for the audience. While the crowd was almost silent during early vagina-related scenes, we were laughing right alongside Paige and her parents by the end. “Lady Parts” is about healing our bodies and our relationships with them. Gross and Boyd insist that vaginas are just as deserving of care and discussion as any other part of ourselves.
Boyd and Griesbeck took care to emphasize this point during the post-screening Q&A, which they opened with a lively audience call and response of the word “vagina.” After laughter and “vaginas” stopped echoing throughout the theater, the filmmakers settled into a discussion of the film’s intent. Griesbeck explained simply that there are a lot of girls who will have this issue in the future, and that she feels it’s important to remind others that vaginal pain isn’t normal or necessary. She signed on to this film with the hopes of preventing others from suffering in the same way that Gross has. Boyd agreed with Griesbeck, adding that if Gross had experienced the same level of pain on her arm, she likely would have received treatment years earlier. Instead, since the pain was vaginal, she struggled with medical and personal stigma for many years. Both filmmakers made it clear that “Lady Parts” exists to break that cycle of shame and pain.
Before the night ended, we heard from a variety of audience members passionate about vaginal health. A retired surgical nurse thanked them for spreading awareness on an issue she had seen often go untreated in her career. A woman who struggled with endometriosis addressed Boyd and Griesbeck in a shaking voice, thanking them for allowing her to feel unashamed and seen in a film for the first time in her life. One audience member found themselves overwhelmed by tears when attempting to express their own struggles with the medical system in the United States. By the end of the night, it was clear “Lady Parts” had already succeeded in its mission — the evening was full of people embracing their own stories and acknowledging their own pain.
The night wasn’t all heavy emotions, though. The crowd also regularly rang with laughter. From the funnier moments in the film to the call-and-response “vaginas,” there was a jovial edge to the entire evening. A particular highlight came during the Q&A, when Griesbeck cracked the audience up by sharing that, in order to cut costs, they filmed all of their doctor’s office scenes in a sex dungeon — in the medical fetish room, to be exact. Overall, the entire evening had a relieved, celebratory tone. How often can you talk freely about vaginas and sex dungeons? Cinetopia’s opening night was a rare, empowering experience. It felt like the first step in unknotting years of learned shame, fear and repression surrounding our own bodies.
By virtue of its indie-film nature, “Lady Parts” is an imperfect film. There are moments of stilted acting, jokes that fall a little flat. But it’s an important film with real heart, which is hard to come by in today’s high-polish film industry. “Lady Parts” demands your attention from its very first scene and holds it until the very end. While the experience of vulvar vestibulitis and vaginismus isn’t incredibly common, almost everyone has experienced some sort of shame or discomfort surrounding their own body. “Lady Parts” urges us to dismantle that shame.
Cinetopia 2025’s opening night was a powerful, insistent reminder that all pain is valid. Your pain deserves to be treated, no matter where it may occur. Having a vagina — having any kind of body at all — is not something to be ashamed of.
For more information on “Lady Parts” and to find upcoming screenings near you, check out the film’s official website.
Daily Arts Writer Lola D’Onofrio can be reached at lolad@umich.edu.
