A Teen Girl In Rural India Defies Tradition in Netflix’s ‘Skater Girl’

When sisters Manjari and Vinati Makijany first began following the rise of skateboarding in rural India, they were instantly intrigued.

“Skateboarding is usually considered to be a boy’s sport, but we were meeting so many girls and boys who were taking to skateboarding and really thriving at it,” said Manjari. “There’s been this unconventional breakthrough of skateboarding in India and it immediately caught our attention.”

Co-written by both sisters and directed by Manjari, their new film Skater Girl — which began streaming on Netflix on June 11 — tells the story of Prerna, a teen girl from a small, isolated village in the rural state of Rajasthan who has had trouble accessing education throughout her life. When Prerna meets a glamorous British Indian executive named Jessica, she begins learning about skateboarding for the first time and quickly embraces the independence the sport allows her.

We had the chance to talk to Manjari and Vinati Makijany about their film, the barriers girls face when it comes to attending school, and what it was like hearing the stories of teens whose childhoods were very different from what their own had been.

Tell us a little about how you got the idea for Skater Girl.

Manjari Makijany: Before we decided that we wanted to write a story about a teenage girl, we knew that we wanted to do a film about the rise of skateboarding in rural India. Then we took this germ of an idea and thought, ‘What would it be like for a girl to be able to chase her skateboarding dreams against this social backdrop?’

What was researching the social issues children and teens in rural Rajasthan face every day like?

Vinati Makijany: It’s definitely very different. It was quite an enlightening journey, I would say. Even though we were both born and raised in India, the life that we have led is so different from the lives that these girls have lived in rural India.

When we first visited, we traveled with a skateboard and we saw that every child we met would interact with it. So we would kick them the skateboard and see how they would respond to skateboarding. What was beautiful to see was that across these various villages, they all had the same joy and they all had that same spirit when they stepped on the skateboard.

We also see how caste and the barriers to accessing schooling impact Prerna’s life. It really illustrates the obstacles rural Indian girls face when it comes to education.

Manjari Makijany: To research the movie, we were interacting with so many girls from rural communities just to understand what their lives were like so that we could tell Prerna’s story from an authentic point of view.

When we were in Rajasthan, we came across a girl who was about 15 in one of the villages and she told us she was married at 13. Then she said, ‘I studied till the eighth grade, and then because I was more educated than my husband, he left me. Now I can't leave my house because my family says I bring shame to them.’

That just completely shocked me. So I asked her, ‘What would you do if you weren’t in this situation?’ She said, ‘Nobody’s ever really asked me that. I haven’t thought of anything beyond that.’ That was eye-opening for me. It made me think about the way we bring up our girls. Gender inequality just doesn't happen overnight. Hearing those stories did influence our script in subtle ways.

Some of the funniest moments in the film come when everyone in the village is surprised by Jessica’s naivete when it comes to life in Rajasthan. Did you see yourself in Jessica at all?

Vinati Makijany: Of course, some of it is fictionalized and dramatized for the film, but we went through a lot of that. We were city girls who were born and raised in Mumbai who were going to work in a village, so we were considered outsiders ourselves. It took a long time for people to understand what we were doing and to readjust and realign what they thought of us.

We wanted to make clear that we're not coming here just to make a movie and go away. We were creating something that was going to live beyond the film. When the locals saw their kids taking to skateboarding and they saw the change in their kids, that's when they started coming around to the skate park. We’d also hear things like ‘My child wouldn’t go to school, but now they are going to school’ and ‘My son would never speak in public when other people were around, but now they are expressing themselves.’ Those moments were quite amazing.

We’ve talked a lot today about what it is like being a woman or girl in rural India. What was it like for both of you while directing a film and running a set in a society where so many women and girls don’t work outside the home?

Manjari Makijany: That’s such an interesting question because we have faced that a lot. As much as I love Rajasthan, it's a beautiful state, it is quite male-dominated. So when we would go to certain places to get certain permissions, the first thing they would ask us is ‘Who can we speak to?’ We would say, ‘It’s our film, you can speak to us.’ So it took them a second.

Then, of course, on location in the village, a lot of the kids were very interesting to observe because they would come in and hang around the set and would ask ‘What exactly do you do?’ So to have the kids look up to a female in charge of a film. It was nice to make it look like a normal thing.