A young girl spreads her wings

‘Did you know this is huge? It doesn’t happen every day. You just gave these kids their first board,” says a character in Manjari Makijany’s Skater Girl. With what happens in Khempur, a small village in Rajasthan, the skateboard isn’t just a toy, it is a symbol of freedom and liberation from having to follow the same endless cycle of unspoken norms.

Unlike other contemporary films involving skateboarding, Skater Girl is mainly an Indian coming-of-age drama, and follows the lives of local teenagers living a life bound by tradition and duty to parents. The tricks that are shown in the movie are pretty basic, but it’s still fun to watch the kids try and pull them off, so don’t go into this movie expecting to see a fun sports movie with cool kickflips or rail…