Exasperating double-standards and old-fashioned attitudes thwart a young female trailblazer in this radiant and engaging Indo-French drama, the winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Coming-of-agers can feel ten-a-penny, but first-time director Shuchi Talati gives us a lesser-seen location and a rebel with a righteous cause, setting her story in the Himalayan foothills of the 1990s and getting plenty of mileage out of the lush and open, yet culturally oppressive environs.

First-time actor Preeti Panigrahi is magnificent as the teenaged Mira, a star student and the first girl to be selected as head prefect at her stubbornly patriarchal and super-strict boarding school, an institution that reflects wider societal attitudes towards men and women. Uncomfortably for Mira, the role involves enforcing a number of archaic school rules, as well as reporting on the behaviour of her fellow students, something which understandably makes her unpopular, including with her good friend Priya (Kajol Chugh).

Mira is distracted from this growing animosity by a sweetly tentative and necessarily clandestine romance with Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), a worldly and marginally older astronomy enthusiast, who has recently moved from Hong Kong and has the freedom that comes with wealthy, neglectful parents. Mira has the opposite parental problem: she’s saddled with a free-spirited young mother with way too much time on her hands. Anila (Kani Kusruti) embarrasses her disciplined and disapproving daughter with her dancing, public displays of affection and non-traditional dress. Anila’s more liberal ideals come in handy though when Mira wants to spend time alone with Sri, away from the prying eyes of teachers and fellow students; it’s a situation which, if Mira isn’t extremely careful, has the potential to morph into a scandal.

The complexities of this mother-daughter relationship are convincingly conveyed by director and screenwriter Talati, who has produced something incredibly accomplished here in her feature debut. We learn how Anila was a teen rebel herself, who ran away for love, and see how she is torn between understanding and wanting to assist her daughter, and trying to abide by the expectations that govern her own rather limited life, acutely aware of the stigma that will come from her daughter fraternising with a boy. Even more problematically for our protagonist, the presence of the handsome and mature Sri starts to stir up trouble in this bored, sexually frustrated housewife, and Mira’s mum begins lavishing Sri with attention; what starts out as maternal fussing and feeding, quickly becomes more flirtatious and competitive.

Told in English and Hindi, Girls Will Be Girls is a deeply affecting, authentic and discomforting portrait of breaking out of your societal box. It’s drawn from Talati’s own experiences of growing up in smalltown India, her desire to challenge the dominant narrative around South Asian representation, to show a sexual awakening without shame, and to put less commonly explored depictions of female transgression on screen. 

She movingly captures the conflict between generations and the struggle to reconcile conflicting impulses, illustrating how Mira’s long-term ambitions and current social standing are jeopardised by perfectly normal desires, though of course they needn’t be. The film is astute on the tumultuousness of those teenage years, being both relatable and fascinatingly specific to its cultural backdrop and characters. For example, Mira adopts a hilariously studious, note-taking approach to her sexual preparations, getting Sri to join her in her internet café research, naively assuming that they are as inexperienced as each other. Lead actress Panigrahi is completely credible and unaffected here. She came through an open audition and was a real find for Talati, bringing an aliveness and strength to the role that the filmmaker felt some of the more experienced actresses lacked.

It’s all strung together in marvellously nuanced and sensitive style, with cinematographer Jih-E Peng’s intimate, yet not too obtrusive lensing presenting a loving, empathetic view of a difficult and confusing time. Although thoughtful and unsensational for the most part, things can get nail-bitingly tense too, with an incident featuring a group of male bullies tipping over into terrifying territory, as the film starkly illustrates the threat that can lurk behind an obsession with propriety.

Girls Will Be Girls is in cinemas from Friday 20 September.