Considering the desperate state of affairs in the USA when it comes to women’s reproductive rights, there’s a particular thrill in watching the Oscars celebrate work that refuses to sanitise the female body. Magnificently named characters—Miss Estrogenia, Mr Dickley, Labinia and Vagianna and their talk of cervixes, menstrual cramps, and reproductive reality—all feature in a nominated short that feels genuinely radical. Co-writers/directors Julia Aks and Steve Pinder’s Jane Austen’s Period Drama has taken a pun so gloriously obvious it’s a wonder nobody made it sooner, all the way to Hollywood’s biggest night, proving that sometimes the best way to tackle stigma is to dress it in a bonnet and let it loose in a drawing room. What began as a three-minute sketch exploded when Aks solicited period stories from a private Facebook group of female opera singers and received everything from mortifying anecdotes to accounts of genuine healthcare failures. The kicker? Much of the comedic ignorance isn’t historic Regency-era accounts of unenlightened times gone by, but rather was lifted from tweets posted in 2022. The conversation, it turns out, is far from over—it just needed better costumes and witty quips. Jane Austen’s Period Drama channels the shadow-rich cinematography of Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, rather than the flat lighting more typically associated with comedy. Dramatic actors were cast to play the stakes truthfully, because in this world, a surprise period could genuinely ruin a woman’s prospects. The laughs land harder when you believe the danger, and when Mr Dickley’s earnest concern is so endearingly misguided, you almost want to there there pat his worries away.
We have been huge fans of the film, with editor-in-chief MarBelle programming it last year for Aesthetica Short Film Festival, which sat amongst a raucous festival circuit journey packed with wins. It was thus no surprise—at least to us here at Directors Notes—they made it onto the nominees list for the Academy Awards Live Action Short Film category, and we were delighted to take some time with the duo as part of our Oscar nominees interview series to delve into their joyful, pun-drunk writing room, the electricity of surprising yourself on set, and why audiences keep approaching them stunned that the shame depicted yet resinged to a bygone age.
When things are funny, there’s a truth to them and when things cross over that line, they get unfunny again. So we follow what we genuinely find funny and the things that really give us deep heart feelings.
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