Writer-Director's Statement
TALISHA ELGER
For the past two years, I’ve been on a frustrating journey with my health — navigating issues that should be simple to solve but felt impossibly complex. The best advice I received? “Do nothing.” Disturbingly, that turned out to be safer than the whirlwind of experimental solutions I’d already endured. Am I better? No. I still don’t have answers. This is the heartbreaking reality of women’s health: when “nothing” is the safest option, the system is deeply broken.
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My pain, frustration, and confusion led me to write SYRINGE.​
SYRINGE is a cinematic response to the lack of research and investment into women’s health. I’m drawn to horror for its capacity to offer an alternative lens for confronting urgent, uncomfortable truths. Through SYRINGE, I explore medical gaslighting, bodily autonomy, systemic control, and the complexities of gynecological pain.
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It’s about women’s pain that’s unseen and unheard — and what we risk when relief comes at the cost of control.
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Producer's Statement
LARA MARKS
At 18, I was prescribed birth control and, consequently, developed crippling anxiety. When I finally sought help, no one questioned the birth control. The proposed solution? Antidepressants. Since then, I’ve been caught in a vicious cycle — each new treatment bringing more complications than the last.
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This is the reality nearly every woman I know has faced. Friends have spent years battling undiagnosed endometriosis, their pain dismissed as “bad periods” or “low pain tolerance.” Others with PCOS, fibroids, or chronic pelvic pain were told to lose weight or “wait and see.” Emotional pain is dismissed as hormonal. Physical pain is pathologized, misdiagnosed, or ignored.
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We’ve grown used to being told it’s all “part of being a woman.”
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But this isn’t just a gap in care — it’s a refusal to believe women when we say something is wrong.
With Syringe, we hope to spotlight these everyday injustices — and the quiet resilience women show in the face of them.
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Because women deserve more than to be told to live with it.
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