Skater Girl

Prerna lives in a village in Rajasthan. She goes to school, but the housework and the fields come first, and her family plans to marry her off before long. A woman arrives from London wanting to see where her father was born. She has a skateboard with her. The children of the village see it and follow it. Prerna gets on. The woman decides to build a skate park in the village, and the elders oppose it. Manjari Makijany directs. It was released on Netflix in 2021. There is something concrete behind the film: a real skate park was built for the shoot in the village of Khempur in Rajasthan, and it was left there when filming ended; it is still in use. The subject is not sport but a girl's right to decide what she does with her own body. The skateboard becomes the concrete form of that. Caste sits inside the narrative; Prerna's family is poor and the hierarchy of the village stands in the way of decisions. Its limit is its shape; the narrative follows a familiar line of development and the obstacles fall away too easily. Most of the young cast are not professionals, and that naturalness is the best thing in it. Who it is for: viewers who like youth films and social drama shot in a real place. Who it is not for: the script is predictable, the outsider positioned as rescuer is contestable, and the ending is too tidy.