Indian American Filmmaker Suchi Talati’s ‘Girls Will Be Girls’ Receives Berlinale Talent Footprints Grants
- The film is to be produced by Indian actors Ali Fazal and Richa Chadha and co-produced by Sanjay Gulati and Pooja Chauhan of Crawling Angel Films.
Indian American filmmaker Suchi Talati’s “Girls Will Be Girls” has received Berlinale Talent Footprints grants including the €10,000 VFF Talent Highlight Award. The film is to be produced by Pushing Buttons Studios, an outfit founded by Indian actors Ali Fazal and Richa Chadha, and co-produced by Sanjay Gulati and Pooja Chauhan of Crawling Angel Films.
The award is presented annually by the VFF — Copyright Agency of Film and TV Producers — and promotes one promising young project from the Talent Project Market organized by the Berlinale Co-Production Market in cooperation with Berlinale Talents. The project was pitched at the market by Chauhan. The film also won the €6,000 ARTEKino International Award, presented by ARTE to honor an artistically outstanding project from the Berlinale Co-Production Market.
Written and to be directed by Talati, “Girls Will Be Girls” is set in an elite boarding school in a small Himalayan hill town in northern India and follows the story of a 16-year-old girl, whose rebellious coming-of-age is hijacked by her mother who never got to come-of-age. “I like my work to challenge dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, and the Indian identity,” Talati told Variety.
Talati and Chadha have been longtime collaborators. They co-directed a documentary about adults living with autism and Down’s syndrome while they were students at Sophia College in Mumbai as an assignment. The two remained close friends and often talked about making films together. “In my opinion, Shuchi is an amazing voice and I’ve been following her evolution for years, knowing that one day an incandescent film would be born from her brain,” Chadha told Bollywood Hungama. “She is definitely a filmmaker to watch out for.”
Talati’s most recent short film, “A Period Piece,” about an afternoon of period sex, was selected for SXSW 2020. Her previous film, “Mae and Ash,” about a tense open relationship, won numerous awards before becoming a Vimeo Staff Pick. She is also a writer/producer for documentaries. Recent credits include “We Are: Brooklyn Saints “for Netflix, and Wyatt Cenac’s “Problem Areas” for HBO, which interrogated policing in communities of color. One of Talati’s episodes was nominated for a GLAAD award. A graduate of the American Film Institute, Talati lives and works in New York City where she co-chairs the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective.