The winner of the Audience Award at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Girls Will Be Girls is a delicate look at girlhood, set in a boarding school nestled in a Himalayan hilltown. The film streaming on Prime Video is an impressive directorial debut by Shuchi Talati — it also marks Richa Chadha’s debut as a producer — who combines a coming-of-age story with an exploration of intergenerational dynamics.

The film’s 16-year-old protagonist, Mira (Preeti Panigrahi), is the golden girl of a prestigious co-educational boarding school. She strides across its halls with a calm confidence, carrying the weight of the institution’s expectations from her as its first female head prefect. Mira wears her achievements like an armour and is eager to excel at everything, including her sexual awakening.

Her neat world is ruffled when Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), a soft-spoken student, joins her class. Hiding in the nooks and crannies of the school, the two experience the thrill of first love and physical intimacy. The stakes are higher for Mira than for Sri. The boarding school subjects its girls to stifling scrutiny while tacitly excusing the behaviour of the boys; hence, Mira’s growing independence is both celebrated and policed.

Talati captures these dynamics with precision. The film seethes with the indignities that girls face regularly: a dress code that reinforces shame, a disapproving principal who preaches “be careful of boys”, and the lopsided enforcement of virtue. Yet Girls Will Be Girls doesn’t simply rail against these inequalities; it shows how deeply embedded they are, passed down through generations like an unwanted heirloom.

At the centre of this inheritance is Anila, Mira’s mother, played by the talented Kani Kusruti. Anila is a woman whose warmth is undercut by her rough edges. As a concerned mother, she forbids Mira from getting into a romance. But that love and care is also mixed with a mother’s resentment from her own girlhood dreams going unfulfilled. In one of the film’s climactic moments, Talati gives us a glimpse of the younger girl inside Anila — the one who never found her voice or freedom.

Much of the brilliance of Girls Will Be Girls lies in its attention to non-verbal cues — furtive glances, an involuntary flinch, a held breath. Cinematographer Jigar Ramani gives the film a touch of intimacy. The camera often stays with Mira, lingering on her face as she processes a world that is shifting under her feet.

Talati portrays Mira’s sexual curiosity with a refreshing frankness, neither sensationalising nor moralising it. Mira’s desire to give free rein to her sexuality is an extension of her ambition: she wants to know, to feel, to excel. In showing the consequences of Mira’s boldness, Talati focuses on the double standards of the world.

Preeti Panigrahi is just right as Mira, her collected persona hiding her longing for love and approval. Panigrahi’s chemistry with Kesav Binoy Kiron feels achingly real. Their relationship oscillates between the sweetness and selfishness of first love. Kiron’s Sri is a gentle, sympathetic figure even as the film critiques the privileges afforded to him as a boy.

But it is Kani Kusruti’s turn as Anila that gives the film its darker, more complex texture. Kusruti makes Anila a volatile mix of bitterness and helplessness, underlining how social expectations can turn maternal love into something possessive and suffocating. The mother-daughter relationship becomes the film’s emotional core, pulsating with tension, love and the sting of unspoken truths.