Like the 15-year-old high schooler she plays in her new film, actor Preeti Panigrahi too came of age on the sets of Girls Will Be Girls. “I had not even kissed a boy,” says the 22-year-old. “Because of the film, I discovered how a kiss works. When I was 15, I was told to stay away from boys because they would distract me from studies,” she adds.
The cautious watch society keeps on girls is at the heart of Girls Will Be Girls, director Shuchi Talati’s feature-length debut. It follows Mira (Panigrahi), an ace student smitten with her charming new classmate, Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), as she navigates both a strict school environment and her unpredictable mother Anila (Kani Kusruti) to steal more time with him.
Produced by Richa Chadha and Claire Chassagne among others, the film picked up an audience award at the recent Sundance Film Festival in Utah, US, in the world cinema dramatic competition, while Panigrahi earned a jury prize for her performance.
Always enamoured by the stage, the young actor made the theatre circle her home as a student at Delhi University’s Hindu College.
She landed an audition for the part of Mira following an open call in 2022, which asked entrants to send in a short video of “what you are or were like in high school: an A-grader or a rule breaker or perhaps a funny story.” Having been the ‘head girl’, Panigrahi knew how to embody ‘head prefect’ Mira with dignity and control. She self-taped two bits and sent it to the team, in true A-grader fashion, “with a couple of variations”.
Talati’s film broaches sexual exploration among Indian teens, otherwise brushed under the carpet or branded as something ‘bad’ girls and boys partake in. Torn between upholding the rules and following her heart, Mira’s part called for vulnerability and defiance. While the film’s makers saw Panigrahi was up for that challenge, they were skeptical about whether she would be allowed to portray intimacy on screen.
The actor first confided in her sister, then her parents, until everyone welcomed the choice. “Once we read the script, the kind of dialogue the film wanted to open about sexuality opened up in my family about the role.” To inform her character, Panigrahi required more internalised emotion than physical expression.
That came from workshops with Dilip Shankar—the casting director behind films such as Monsoon Wedding and Angry Indian Goddesses —where she learnt to chant mentally to bring on the particular mood.
“It could be something as silly or intense as ‘I hate this woman’, ‘I really want to kill this woman’; then the lines I would speak and my face would be almost wired with that intention,” explains the actor, who also found immense support from her family. While her father’s passion for theatre inspired her craft, her mother encouraged in little ways like stitching an outfit for her to wear to Sundance.
The chemistry with her co-actors helped too. For instance, Kiron who plays Sri felt like a kindred spirit given Girls Will Be Girls was his first film too. And “a lot of Mira’s performance was reacting to the actions of Kusruti’s Anila”.
Recalling a scene where Mira forbids her mother from helping her drape a sari, Panigrahi says, “To see her expressions, the hurt on her face, I got goosebumps. I used these experiences towards the end of the film.”
In the final sequence, Panigrahi’s restrained performance shines the brightest. Drawing on all the emotions she had bottled up until then, she was unexpectedly moved to cathartic tears. So much so that cinematographer Jih-E Peng, who had fixed her camera in position, had to move it to capture the departure from the original script.
At the film’s premiere, it was this moment of improvisation by Panigrahi that left many in the audience moved too.
