Uplifting 'Skater Girl' introduces India's newest stars

As someone who grew up watching Indian movies, I disappeared for a while. After seeing children who looked like me in movies like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai or other miscellaneous Bollywood side roles, I saw no trace of my age group in film once I hit adolescence.

Mainstream Bollywood movies are usually heterosexual rom-coms about adults in or slightly out of college. Even the much-hyped Bollywood version of The Fault in Our Stars, a direct adaptation, cast actors in their 20s and 30s. Occasionally, a child might appear in a minor role or indie project — or explode on the international stage like with Slumdog Millionaire or Lion — but for the most part, teenagers simply don't exist.

That's why Skater Girl, Netflix's latest Indian original film, is a revelation.

Written and directed by Manjari Makijany (and co-written by Vinati Makijany), Skater Girl is the story of Prerna (Rachel Saanchita Gupta), a village girl in Rajasthan, India who falls in love with skateboarding. Nothing in Prerna's life, from school to household work to her impending marriage as a teenager — comes anywhere close to the happiness and purpose she finds on a board.

That's the movie Skater Girl should be, and for the most part it is. The other side of the story is that Prerna and her little brother Ankush (Shafin Patel) get introduced to skating by visiting Londoner Jessica (Amy Maghera) who does little more than serve as an inexplicable conduit to the Western audience some producer no doubt urged filmmakers to court (and who underscores Indian cinema's obsession with light skin).

The rest of the film is an intimate look at village life in Prerna's world, and it is far more compelling. She and Ankush and the rest of their friends find delight in small things, like the roughly constructed "bearing car" Ankush first makes that resembles a skateboard. Prerna enjoys moments of tenderness with an upper caste boy from school, the only person in the village who doesn't care for status and loves what he sees in her.

Gupta and Patel are first-time film actors but naturals on camera. They feel as much like promising young talent as actual children in a way that many performances never do. Anurag Arora and Swati Daas are also excellent as her parents, protective yet loving within the confines of a patriarchal society. Prerna's father is a difficult character to watch, but gritty and authentic in Arora's hands. In fact, every Indian actor in the film nails it (including powerhouse Waheeda Rahman), which is less an indictment of Maghera and other foreign cameos than of how needless their roles are in the first place.

With Prerna pulled between childhood and adulthood, Skater Girl becomes the kind of coming-of-age sports movie I would have devoured in my Disney Channel heyday, and one with an Indian teenager in the title role. Prerna actually doesn't know her exact age — not uncommon in rural India — but sees her life branching between school and home, sports and marriage, past and future.

What Skater Girl captures with its young leads is nothing short of magic. Scenes of the village children getting their skateboards, practicing in the park, and eventually competing in a local competition are effervescent with joy. It's a rare foray into this genre for Indian cinema, and the new talent on display promises a bright future indeed.

Skater Girl is now streaming on Netflix.