I have always had a fondness for coming of age films that vividly recall how intense our emotions are during pivotal moments of growth and transition. In many ways, we as humans are coming of age throughout our entire lives. It is an experience not merely confined to our adolescence, and that is a truth conveyed so brilliantly in one of my favorite films from 2024, “Girls Will Be Girls.” It marks the debut feature of its writer/director Shuchi Talati and stars newcomer Preeti Panigrahi in a performance for the ages. She plays Mira, a sharp and self-assured teen who becomes the first female prefect at her boarding school, where outdoor events are set against a dizzying view of the Himalayas.
After catching the eye of a smitten peer, Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), Mira undergoes a sexual awakening that further complicates her frayed relationship with her mother, Anila (the magnificent Kani Kusruti), who harbors her own repressed and unexplored desires. “Girls Will Be Girls” deservedly won the World Cinema – Dramatic Audience Award and a Special Jury Award for Panigrahi at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, and is nominated for two prizes at tomorrow’s Film Independent Spirit Awards: Best Supporting Performance for Kusruti and the John Cassavetes Award. Just days before the ceremony, I had the great privilege of speaking via Zoom with Talati and Panigrahi about their unforgettable collaboration and why their film sets a new benchmark for Indian cinema.
Last night, I sought out Shuchi’s early short film, “Mae & Ash,” which portrays the tense, largely unspoken dynamics between its three characters in a way that reminded me of the scenes where Mira, Anila and Sri uneasily share the same space in “Girls Will Be Girls.”
Shuchi Talati (ST): “Mae & Ash” was the first film where I really found my voice as a director. I felt like I lost my way a little bit in film school, and after graduating, I started to write this film with a friend, Kelsey McNamee, who plays the lead and is the co-producer. It really started just as an exercise for her and me. I wanted to do something where I didn’t care about what anyone would think about it. I shut out any concerns that people might complain, “There is no conflict in the film,” or, “Why are the characters offering each other tea when they should be duking it out over whether or not to have an open relationship?” That really helped me.
I understood that what interested me were these very minute shifts of power that are often gendered in relationships. They may seem small, but for the people who are experiencing them, they can feel as cataclysmic as an earthquake. I also wanted to capture things that the characters may not know about themselves. Mae has convinced herself that she is okay with this open relationship, but then the feelings that she has suppressed all this time come bubbling up in the moment.
It seems like you’re both attracted to storytelling in which the innermost thoughts of characters are conveyed visually rather than verbally.
Preeti Panigrahi (PP): Yeah, I think you engage the audience when you don’t show them a lot of things. I’m a big fan of films that make me think while I’m watching them rather than spoon-feed me everything. These days, you have films designed for “ambient watching” to let people do other things while the film is running, and I do not enjoy that. A film should have my entire attention, and I like trying to figure out what’s happening in the story. Even as a performer on this film, I had the space to interpret my character and walk around certain emotions. If it was written in the script that I was supposed to cry during a particular scene, but I was not able to cry on the day of filming, I could take it in a different direction emotionally. That flexibility is part of what makes a film like this beautiful at the end of the day.
There’s a key moment in the film where a character says, “You’re going to get oil on your face,” but the emotions reverberating within the line are immense and so much more powerful when left unarticulated.
ST: Many things that characters say in films we would never say in life because it is too vulnerable. There are times where it’s too scary for us to express love, hurt, anger, fear—all of these things that are deep emotions. There’s always a risk when you express them in life. As a result, you might smile when you’re angry because you don’t want to be seen that way, or it may be painful for you to be angry with someone you love. While writing this film, I really tried to inhabit my characters and think about what they would do at each moment. I teach screenwriting too, and when I read my students’ work, I’m always reminding them, “Your character should feel the emotional risk that you would feel as a person in this situation. They can’t just say the things that you as the writer want them to say.”
I’ve learned that theatre was a vital mode of expression for Preeti growing up, as it certainly was for me.
ST: I did some theatre in high school, and actually at that point, I was really interested in being an actor. I loved the feeling of inhabiting another person and emotional reality, so I did that for a while. I grew up in a small town, but when I enrolled at a well-known liberal arts college in Bombay, I auditioned for a play and realized that I was years behind all of the city kids. That made me lose all confidence in myself as an actor, and I started working behind the scenes on productions before eventually finding my way to film.
PP: I love the stage. It was so great to have, as a kid, summer programs where people from the National School of Drama would come teach us. For the first few days, we’d have workshops where no one would judge you for being absolutely weird. You’d be running around, making faces and getting rid of any fear of what people might be thinking about you. Then you would begin working on the script you were given, auditioning for it, getting your part and memorizing your lines. Every day, you’d wake up feeling a sense of excitement that after having your food and leaving home, you’d be spending the whole day rehearsing.
I love the bonds I made with people backstage, and it would always be so emotional when we had to parts ways. We’d always be looking forward to the final performance, but when we found ourselves delivering our lines for the last time onstage, it would always be a little crushing. Stepping into another character and becoming a different person through theater helped me accept myself. It’s a great activity to detach from your own personality because we sometimes focus too much on ourselves and everything that is going on inside of us. It’s always nice to step outside, look at yourself and realize that we are all connected.
What sort of person were you hoping to find for the role of Mira, and how did Preeti meet or transcend your expectations?
ST: There is one quality that I look for in all actors. I sometimes call it an aliveness behind the eyes or a live wire quality. Basically I am looking for somebody who hasn’t analyzed the script, understood all the beats, and is simply planning to go from beat to beat, because that is not how humans are. I am looking for someone who does something unexpected and feels like they are in the moment, because that unexpectedness is what makes you lean in and watch. It captures our voyeuristic curiosity that causes us to watch other people because we don’t know what they are going to do next. I want to see that in an actor and then specifically for Mira, I was looking for a kind of inner strength and dignity that I only articulated once the auditions started coming in.
The two audition scenes we had for actresses trying out for the part of Mira were the moment where she dances in front of the mirror as her mother enters the room, and her first major conversation with Sri at the astronomy club. For the dance scene, I was looking for somebody who had that kind of unselfconsciousness that would enable her to act as she would in front of a mirror when no one is looking. Preeti had a great audition, and was making all kinds of funny faces at her reflection. When I saw actresses audition with the astronomy club scene, many of them seemed to have been trained through cinema on how young women are supposed to look when they fall in love. They acted like a very coy ingenue, batting their eyelids, and they did not have the strength or dignity that was needed for Mira. Preeti was the only person who played the scene in the way I had envisioned it.
Mira was the head prefect and needed to be played by someone who had a spine. She really has agency and maintains her strength even amidst heartbreak. She has the courage to say no to relationships even when it is painful. When I met Preeti, I was struck by her intelligent take on the character. She shares some similarities with Mira and understood her psychology to the point where I didn’t have to say many things about it to her. By the time I met her, not only had she read the script, she had made her mom and her sister both read it so they could all talk about the sex scenes and level of intimacy in the film together. So basically, Preeti cleared all of the obstacles before she even came to the audition, and I was really impressed by that.
In the credits, I saw that the song, “Teri Nazar,” which Mira dances to while looking at her reflection, was an original composition.
ST: Yes, that is a song written for the film by Sneha Khanwalkar, one of my favorite composers working in India. She is one of the few female composers who has made it to the A-list, and for years, people were telling me, “You should meet Sneha, you remind me of her.” They apparently were saying the same thing to her about me, so we finally met for this film. “Girls Will Be Girls” is set in the late 90s, which was a time when the sound of Bollywood music changed. Western pop culture had come to India, and there were a couple iconic films where the music had more of a bass beat. Sneha and I listened to these songs that we grew up with and decided that we wanted the music to sound like it had been written after the shift. It’s the sort of private song that you would only want to dance to alone, and definitely not with your mom. [laughs]
I also love the use of Mary Carewe’s “Take It or Leave It” for the scene where Mira dances with Sri before Anila joins in.
ST: In the script, it was actually written to be “Dancing Queen” because for some strange reason, ABBA was huge with my parents’ generation. It was the first kind of western pop music that I listened to, so I know basically every ABBA song. We did try to write to the band and ask for their permission, but I don’t know if our request ever got to them. So we began searching for a soundalike that could seem like a disco hit. I actually found “Take It or Leave It” in a music library of all places, and I was like, ‘This song is so perfect.’
Among the films Preeti recommended in her Letterboxd “Four Favorites” segment is Reema Sengupta’s “Counterfeit Kunkoo,” a fascinating short about female Indian identity that features Kani Kusruti, who plays Anila.
PP: I first heard about Kani when she won Best Actress at the Kerala State Film Awards in 2020 for the film “Biriyaani,” and started to seek out her work, particularly her collaborations with director Anand Gandhi. After seeing her on the brilliant series, “OK Computer,” I realized that she is unafraid of taking on any role. Kani is so great at getting into the skin of characters with all sorts of different energies. I thought “Counterfeit Kunkoo” and Reema, its director, were brilliant, and when I first read the script for “Girls Will Be Girls,” I thought, ‘There is probably one person who could play Anila and it is Kani.’
ST: Really?!
PP: Yes! It was on the second day of our chemistry tests when I found out that I would be testing with Kani, and I was so happy. I was also really nervous upon meeting her. She is a powerhouse of talent, after all, and yet I found her to be so humble and grounded. Kani welcomed and accepted me, and I just love her so much. Another film of her’s that Shuchi told me about, “Memories of a Machine,” is also a masterclass in acting. She doesn’t do the sort of beat by beat performance that Shuchi was describing. She conveys so much simply by how she rubs her eyes or fixes her shirt. I really love watching her and it was an honor to perform with her.
Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine As Light” also stars Kani and would make a perfect double bill with your film. These pictures both serve as an antidote to the misogyny and repression we are currently seeing empowered in America and around the world. There is great importance in removing stigmas from female sexuality and illuminating the double standards endured by women through art, which is all the more effective when it isn’t didactic.
PP: I agree that it is very important. Just a few days ago, we had a screening where someone exclaimed that the intimacy we see in the film is larger than life, and I was a bit taken aback by that comment. Intimacy has often been glorified in cinema to the extent where you expect it to be a larger than life experience. There’s so much pressure on how people are supposed to look and act in the media that we see. Women are always put on a pedestal and glamorized so that they appear flawless.
What I loved about the way Shuchi orchestrated intimate scenes is how she made them very much in sync with how awkward and vulnerable we are in these moments. When you kiss someone for the first time, you may be afraid to open your eyes because the person will appear too close, as if you are looking at them through a fisheye lens. It’s those kind of awkward moments that she has captured so well, and they set a new benchmark for Indian cinema in how they portray intimacy as it is, without any music. They aren’t there simply to tantalize the audience.
I love when women onscreen are allowed to just be. We are so used to never questioning male narratives in which the man is always portrayed as the action hero who gets to kick and punch the villain. It has long been the assumption that women cannot portray this sort of heroism, but I love how recent screen narratives have illuminated the heroic aspects of being a mother, a lover, or simply a woman who is exploring herself sexually and existing in a society that is so patriarchal. When Mira sees her male peers harassing her friends, she doesn’t back down from telling her teacher that there must be consequences for their actions. When it finally happens, it is a little victory that I really enjoy seeing onscreen. It is these victories that need to be accounted for and come out in the narratives we tell.
ST: Growing up in India, I didn’t really see any portrayals of sexuality that were realistic, nuanced, or explored how you felt. These Bollywood songs and sequences did not reflect our experience at all, and even now—including in the West—I feel that sexuality is often shown in a way that prioritizes the choreography of it over the emotional experience. My film is not physically explicit, but it is emotionally explicit in how it explores one’s insecurity about their body and fear that their partner may not be turned on. Any act of intimacy is really a dialogue between two people. You build trust, you lose trust, you learn something about the other person, you get hurt, you hurt someone. I was interested in exploring all of that by showing, like Preeti said, the messy and uncomfortable parts of intimacy. If we don’t include them in films, we are putting them in an area that is shrouded in shame.
By affirming that this is, in fact, an important part of our experience that deserves to be explored and put onscreen, we are taking it out of the little corner where it is so often shoved. Having the film not be preachy was also super-important to me. Cinema is not a good place for preaching. If you want to do that, write an essay. Cinema is good for experiencing by allowing you to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. If you are trying to start out with a thesis that you want to prove, then you will be forced to make characters who are simpler. The characters in my film are not simple. Anila is, in some ways, an ally, but she is also enforcing patriarchal rules. Mira is exploring herself, all the while being really judgmental towards her mom. These are imperfect characters, and what I want is for people to inhabit their shoes and then reflect on their experience.
I read all the Letterboxd reviews for my film, and occasionally, I’ll see one that moves me deeply. There are men who have written, “I felt like a teenage girl for the first time,” and, “I realized that I have not reflected on my privilege,” and, “I need to be thinking about my mom and the women in my life differently.” Cinema can give you that experience, and that’s what I want to do through my work. You leave it open-ended so audiences can bring themselves to it. All I want is for the film to leave a residue, a perfume of sorts, that makes you reflect.
I spotted the name of another taboo-busting filmmaker I admire, Joanna Arnow, listed in your Special Thanks credits.
ST: Joanna’s a good friend. I have a little cameo in her film, “The Feeling That the Time For Doing Something Has Passed.” My husband and I play her more square friends who are helping her make her dating profile. We shot the scene in my living room.
That’s right! I love that film too.
ST: We were doing postproduction on “Girls Will Be Girls” in France when Joanna’s film premiered at Director’s Fortnight, so we went to Cannes and were able to be there for the premiere. It got about a five or six-minute standing ovation. I think she is a singular filmmaker.
And she is fearless in her portrayal of sexuality and awkwardness. How did you go about creating a safe space for your actors when filming scenes of intimacy?
ST: I have never had the chance to work with intimacy coordinators, and that has often been due to the limitations of our budget. In India, there are a few intimacy coordinators who are very expensive, and it would’ve cost too much for us to fly one of them out for an indie production that was being shot in the mountains. So I read up on what intimacy coordinators do, and had previously directed the 2018 short, “A Period Piece,” that also contains a fair amount of sexuality. While making these films, I’ve developed my own technique for directing scenes of intimacy, which is relatively simple. One is total transparency with my actors right from the beginning about what is required by the film before they even come in to meet me so we don’t waste anyone’s time.
Then we talk about the importance of each scene. I wanted Preeti and Kesav to know how important these scenes were to the story, since the dynamic between both of their characters shifts every time, leading to the final sex scene, which is a breakup scene. In each case, there is a dialogue happening between the characters, and that makes it harder to perform. During rehearsals, we would start with simple exercises where it would just be the three of us. The actors would give each other permission on where they could be touched, and any touching in this sort of artificial setting is an odd thing. Touch can evoke feelings. An actor can feel things when they are touched, and they can also feel nothing because it is all so constructed. I wanted them to know that whatever they felt was okay.
The three of us had built enough trust so that we could choreograph the scenes together. After that, I brought in my cinematographer, Jih-E Peng, who also shot “A Period Piece” and is an amazing badass. She would come in to take photos that would give the actors an idea of the angles for each shot. When it came time to film these scenes, we would have a closed set with very few crew members, all of whom were women. It was during the filming of these scenes where I would allow the actors to view the framing for each shot on the monitor, which I would not let them do otherwise. This enabled them to not only see how they were being photographed, but also leave room for them to change something, which I recall was only requested once and led us to move the camera accordingly. I wanted to have the actors feel empowered because otherwise, it may have been traumatic for them.
“A Period Piece” had a tiny budget, and I remember the lead actress, Sonal Aggarwal, had arrived three days before the shoot. We went for a walk, and she said, “You know, I think it is really important to see South Asian people and brown bodies as sexual beings. I really believe in that, but it is really scary when it’s your body.” [laughs] And I said, “Yeah, it is scary. It’s cool to be amongst the first, but people will say things, and it will be uncomfortable. There may be judgment that will come from your aunties and uncles and parents and grandmas, and I understand that it’s scary.” Then I told her, “If you don’t want to do it, you can always say no.” That was scary for me to say, since I had assembled the whole crew and the actors were flying in—her from Chicago and her co-star from LA—and she replied, “No, I want to do it, but it was important for me to hear that I still had that freedom.”
PP: I don’t think I understood the essence of what Shuchi, Jih-E, and even our editor Amrita David did for us until I was on sets where there was an absolute lack of that freedom and safety. To me, it felt like a given that Shuchi’s set would be a safe space and that nothing wrong was going to happen there. I was draped in a towel for the scene where Mira kisses her hand in the wash room, and I was so comfortable in my skin that after we shot it, I immediately thought, ‘This is exactly how sets are supposed to work, and this is the exact number of people that should be required onset to pull off this sort of scene.’ But when I was on other sets where intimate scenes were being filmed, you could sense the feeling of apprehension that was caused in part by the lack of women present.
As an actor in that sort of environment, you begin to worry that if you voice your disapproval over something, you won’t be accepted later on. You tend to get your energy from the people working around you, and Shuchi kept that communication open so that I was never afraid about saying no to anything. Other directors may become passive aggressive and try pestering you into agreeing with them. I’m not saying I was in a situation like this, but this is exactly how it can happen. I was also comforted by the fact that the footage would ultimately be sent to a female editor. Of course, there are certain people in India who are only interested in circulating the intimate scenes, but I knew that there was nothing exploitative about the intent or approach of the film. I am very happy and satisfied as an artist that I got to make this movie.
ST: Matt, thank you so much for your great questions and for doing the research. It was really a fun conversation. We have talked about the film so much at this point that it’s rare when it feels fresh.
“Girls Will Be Girls” is available to rent and purchase on Prime Video. The Film Independent Spirit Awards will stream live at 4pm CT tomorrow, February 22nd, on the official YouTube page of Film Independent.
