Girls Will Be Girls gets the ‘The Audience Award’ at the Sundance Film Festival 2024
The only Indian movie at the Sundance Film Festival 2024 GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS has got ‘The Audience Award’. Below is the synopsis, director’s statement and credits of the movie accessed from the Sundance Film Festival 2024 website. The trailer is amazingly intriguing and bold. The theme is rarely dealt with in Indian cinema as it dwells into happenings in a conservative setup. This is not a review as we have not seen the movie.
Synopsis:
In a strict boarding school nestled in the Himalayas, 16-year-old Mira discovers desire and romance. But her sexual, rebellious awakening is disrupted by her mother who never got to come of age herself.
With precision and sensitivity, first-time feature director Shuchi Talati invites us into the lives of characters she intimately understands and deciphers, allowing us to experience adolescent sexual discovery with all its conflicting emotions. Preeti Panigrahi embodies Mira with nuanced sincerity, her hesitation transforming into confidence when she’s swept up by Kesav Binoy Kiron’s charismatic, wry Sri. Kani Kusruti, meanwhile, gives a brilliant performance as Mira’s cunning mother, Anila, setting up the perfect game of mother-daughter chess as these women descend into a struggle that threatens their affection for each other.
Beautifully exploring the origins of empowerment and the limits of trust, Girls Will Be Girls celebrates the freedom of self-acceptance and the solace of female agency, sensuality, and physicality.—AS
Director Shuchi Talati’s statement:
GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS is set in a conservative boarding school, much like the school I attended, where girls are policed, ostensibly to protect their “virtue.” Male sexuality is allowed to express itself, sometimes in aggression towards girls; while we’re instructed to be submissive and ashamed of our bodies. Despite this, I saw fierce, funny girls and women all around who subverted and circumvented the social and moral codes.
In GIRLS, I wanted to write about these subversive women who populated my life but never my screens and to expand the narratives that are available to Indian women. Films from India (and the west) often erase real female bodies. Breasts and butts are hypersexualized, but masturbation, menstruation, vaginas, etc. are treated with revulsion or embarrassment. This erasure is a part of the way girls are trained to be invisible in a world that’s afraid of their sexuality, identity and voice. But Mira (16) and her mother Anila (38) are embodied beings with secretions and desires. Mira examines her vagina in a mirror, masturbates by rubbing up against a teddy bear, and plans her first time having sex. Anila shuns the self-sacrificing, asexual roles mothers are relegated to. She envies her daughter’s youth and boyfriend and pursues her desires with fervor. Both mother and daughter are outspoken, subversive characters who emerge defiant, if not necessarily triumphant.
The film is set in the late 1990s, when the Indian economy was opened up to western exports. This sparked fierce culture wars between debauched ‘westernness’ and virtuous ‘Indianness’. Women’s bodies became battlegrounds in the war and women in miniskirts or with sexual agency became symbols of corruption. Unfortunately, this is still scarily resonant in many parts of the world today.
Though the film is rooted in the 1990s in India and is a close observation of gender roles, sexuality and oppressive patriarchy, I’m not interested in a grand thesis statement or preaching about social issues.
It’s very important to me that Mira and Anila are not defined by their identities as Indian women and that they don’t have to become stand-ins for their community. I want to allow them their full range of humanity: to be in love, experience disillusionment, envy and grief, and to represent only their peculiar and singular selves, not their full cultures. Because this is how their stories will also be universal—a luxury mostly reserved for characters from dominant cultures.
🏆 The Audience Award: World Cinema Dramatic presented by @united goes to GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS, directed by Shuchi Talati. #Sundance pic.twitter.com/57wFeGYqJL
— Sundance Film Festival (@sundancefest) January 26, 2024
Written and directed by Shuchi Talati
Produced by Richa Chadha, Claire Chassagne, Shuchi Talati
Cast: Preeti Panigrahi, Kani Kusruti, Kesav Binoy Kiron
Prouction Companies: Pushing Buttons Studio (India) and Dolce Vita Films (France) with Crawling Angel Films (India)
Executive Produced by Cinema Inutile, Blink Digital and Arte Cofinova 19
Sales: Luxbox
Sources – https://festival.sundance.org/program/film/656a01abfac9f401e9c041dd and https://shuchitalati.com/girls-will-be-girls
