Richa Chadha, Ali Fazal make foray into film production with Girls Will Be Girls

Artistes Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal, who are a real-life couple, are venturing into film production with Girls Will Be Girls.

The film will be produced via their newly launched banner Pushing Buttons Studios.

Written and directed by filmmaker Shuchi Talati, the film is about a sixteen-year-old, Mira, whose rebellious coming of age is hijacked by her mother. The mother and daughter grow up together through the course of the script and their fraught-but-loving relationship is the beating heart of the film. The film is set in an elite boarding school in a small Himalayan town.

 “I like my work to challenge dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, and the Indian identity,” says Talati.

Girls Will Be Girls is the only Indian script picked for the prestigious Berlinale Script Station 2021, a lab that selects 10 projects from around the world every year. The script has also been selected for the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film Lab, and it won a New York State Council of the Arts Grant for development.

Lauding Talati, Chadha said the cinematic world the filmmaker has created in Girls Will Be Girls is "relatable, often cruel but never hopeless or nihilistic".

"Its honest awkwardness will make you chuckle, not weep. It's full of relatable, lived-in episodes that one finds oddly satisfying — like popping a zit. The mother in our story routinely dodges the self-sacrificing stereotype of the typical Indian mom — she's complicated, grey, and not a martyr," the 34-year-old actress said in a statement.

Talati and Chadha, who have been collaborators since their college days, first presented Girls Will Be Girls as part of the NFDC’s Film Bazaar co-production market, where they found like-minded producing partners in Sanjay Gulati from Crawling Angel Films, Delhi and Claire Chassagne of Dolce Vita Film, France. 

Fazal said the film is close to their hearts as it marks their production debut. "I am also excited that our studio will enter the market with such a progressive, female-led story. We hope to be able to tell thought-provoking and universal stories with humour and love,” he added.