From an early age, songs and fairytales convinced Zelma that Love would solve all her problems as long as she abided by societal expectations of how a girl should act. But as she grew older something didn’t seem right with the concept of love: the more she tried to conform, the more her body resisted. A story about the acceptance of the inner female rebellion.

For thousands of years marriage has been considered a pivotal moment in a woman’s life. Having a husband and children was the only pathway to personal fulfilment.

Times may have changed, but attitudes of many have not. Girls and women still face pressure to be submissive to their husbands, partners, boyfriends and male counterparts.

I have been married twice with both marriages collapsing spectacularly. Looking back, I recognize that in the first marriage I failed to identify the abuse which was rooted in a rigid view of gender. Without equality, our intimacy eroded. In the second, although I was married to a gender-bending man, we were stuck in traditional gender roles too and didn’t open our minds to other possibilities. I decided to show how social structures and hierarchies reflect on neural pathways, and the chemistry that occurs when people fall in and out of love. By wrapping my personal story around scientific findings, I was hoping to help women examine their own intimate relationships. We rarely think of the effects our cultural biases have on us, of the chemistry in our brains as we fall in and out of love. Yet these are critical components of our daily lives and it’s important to recognize them.

Signe Baumane is a Latvian-born, Brooklyn-based independent filmmaker, artist, writer, and animator. She has made 17 award-winning animated shorts but is best known for her first animated feature ROCKS IN MY POCKETS. The film covers a 100-year history of depression and suicide of women in her family, including herself. It premiered at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2014, went on to over 130 international festivals and opened theatrically in the U.S. through Zeitgeist Films.