Pioneering early 90’s indie musicians flip the script on menopause with the help of age-inclusive music scenes and the revolutionary effects of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT).
Women have been misinformed with faulty studies, underfunded research about menopause and a general lack of education and access to highly effective forms of Hormone Replacement Therapy. Why are women still getting their health information from a whisper network, and not the medical establishment? Why at this moment are aging women rejecting the traditional experience of middle age they were taught to endure and flipping the script of menopausal “invisibility?” Lifers offers powerful, dynamic, positive portraits of women who are thriving at an age when they have traditionally been expected to retire from polite society.
As young female musicians, our participants got swept up in the first wave of early 90’s “alternative rock” and the feminist punk movement, “riot grrl." By the early 2000’s the scene had become toxic - many of them had burned out and become traumatized, disappearing from the spotlight, choosing completely different lives. Thirty years later this same women have returned full force to music, picking up where they left off, but as adults - with kids, careers, health challenges, marriage, divorce, deaths and disasters. By telling their stories while revealing the truth behind peri-menopause and menopause, the film encourages women to advocate for themselves during their hormonal journeys and to spark change in their own lives and the communities that surround them.
Our main characters are a group of lifelong female musicians navigating a changing world with radically shifting hormones, rediscovering and nourishing themselves through music as a matter of emotional and spiritual survival.
Corin Tucker - Participant
Gilly Ann Hanner - Participant
Jen Sbragia - Participant
Alicia J. Rose - Participant
