Some films tell you what a health crisis looks like. H.P.V. (Her Pretty Vagina) makes you feel the exact moment no one is looking at you while you’re in it, and that’s the difference between a PSA and a piece of art.
Written, directed, and produced by Kiah Clingman, H.P.V. stars Taylor Polidore Williams (“Reasonable Doubt,” “Beauty In Black), the 17-minute short is a deeply personal exploration of rarely discussed but common women’s reproductive health issues, including HPV, endometriosis, and cervical cancer. It’s intimate, funny, refreshing, and deeply unsettling, often within the same scene, and it forces a reckoning with the cultural stigma that keeps women, especially Black women, suffering in silence. The film won the Shore Scripts Finishing Funds Prize, and Clingman was named to EBONY Magazine’s “9 Directors Who Left Their Mark” following the film’s World Premiere at the American Black Film Festival.
H.P.V. is brilliant and should be required viewing. It takes on a subject that, even as a woman, I realized I knew almost nothing about, but this film gave me a much deeper understanding of how life altering reproductive health issues really are.
The genius of the film is in how it builds pressure and then makes you watch that pressure get swallowed. You hear the teapot before you see anything else, a whistle that runs through the entire film as its tipping-point throughline, the sound of something heating up long before it’s allowed to boil over. That’s the film’s structure in miniature. It opens sounding like pleasure, then reveals she’s actually in agony, a misdirection that sets the tone for everything after: every time someone in her life turns away from her pain, whether it’s the ex who dismisses her, the doctor’s office that won’t really see her, or the well-meaning stranger who tries to empathize but misses the point, the film briefly breaks from reality and lets her react the way she actually wants to. She attacks, she lashes out, she makes an entire coffee shop feel exactly what she feels. Then she snaps back to who she actually is: composed, quiet, giving nothing away, the kettle taken off the heat before it screams. Those suspended, dreamlike beats aren’t fantasy for its own sake. They’re a portrait of how women, and particularly Black women, keep their composure around people who dismiss or push away their pain, even when everything in them wants to boil over.
That dynamic runs deepest in her relationship. She stays with a partner who’s selfish, but she feels bonded to him because he showed up for her at her worst. That’s a trauma bond, connection built on the trauma itself, and instead of walking away for something better, she settles for whatever he’s willing to give her. It’s the same dismissal she gets everywhere else, just wearing a softer face.
What makes the film work is that it earns all of this without ever going heavy the whole way through. You feel every bit of the frustration, but it never suffocates you, so you are able to enjoy every emotion from quiet frustration to even rage without wanting to miss away from this entertaining and informative short.
I learned more about HPV and other health issues, and about how women’s reproductive health gets dismissed, in this 17-minute short than I have in my entire life. It’s the kind of film that opens an audience up to have many health conversations in a way that feels safe and welcoming to have.