When a skate park was built in rural India, the order of the village was shattered – it became not only a birthplace of children's creativity, but also a playground to challenge India's caste and gender biases.
This is the true story, and it is also the story told by Netflix's movie "Skateboard Girl", which was launched in June this year.
In the movie, a teenage rural girl drags a simple skateboard with a rope and runs along a dusty road with her brother sitting on a wooden board.
The 15-year-old Girl Prerna struggles to live under the shackles of poverty, responsibility and tradition — she dropped out of school to sell peanuts in markets, and some of her peers her age have married early and had children.
Stills from the Skateboard Girl movie.
However, when Jessica, who is of Indian British descent, came to the village, she introduced the children to the world of skateboarding. Skateboarding gave Prerna a first taste of freedom, confidence and not being bound by rules. But her traditional father had a different plan for her future.
Mumbai-born director Manjari Makijany, who now works in Los Angeles, insisted on building a skate park in Khempur, the filming location. In 2018, India's skate park design company 100 Ramps and skateboarding group Holystoked built a skate park within 45 days with the help of friends at home and abroad.
After the filming of Skateboard Girl was completed, the skate park was handed over to the local community. Today, the skateboarding grounds in the film have become training grounds for children in rural India.
The skate park in the film was left to the local community.
In fact, before this film, there have been many such stories that have actually happened in poor areas.
In 2015, German Ulrike Reinhard built Janwaar Castle, a 450-square-meter skatepark in rural India, in rural India, turning almost all the children in the village into skateboarders.
The lives of some girls have changed as a result – in 2018, Asha Gond, a girl who came out of the village of Janwaar, represented India at the World Skateboarding Championships in Nanjing. She was almost at the bottom of the list, but she was the only Indian in the women's competition.
Asha Gond, whose fate was changed by skateboarding.
Growing up with Asha Gond, low-caste children like her were not allowed to play with their high-caste peers. Girls tend to marry early and have extremely low literacy rates.
The skatepark is free and open to all children in the village, regardless of caste. Although members of the upper castes do not receive special treatment, girls do. One of the rules of the skate park is "girls first," which means that if there is no free skateboard, the girl can ask the boy to give her his skateboard.
"The fate of girls is already predestined on the day they are born," Reinhard said, a way to address gender inequality.
Not everyone is happy to see girls skateboarding, and villagers gossip that girls are better off learning to cook than skateboarding. Asha Gond said: "They often say to my parents, 'What is she going to do when she goes to her husband's house?' ’”
The second rule of the skate park is "No School, no skateboarding" No Skateboarding）。 As a result, attendance in schools has increased dramatically.
Reinhard, who has lived in India most of her life since 2012, has been considering building a school in rural India. But the idea that ultimately decided to build a skate park was inspired by the nonprofit Skateistan.
Skateboard girls in Afghanistan
In 2008, Oliver Percovich founded Skateistan in Afghanistan. Today, they have expanded from Afghanistan to Cambodia, South Africa and other places, providing skateboarding instruction and curriculum education for children. They focus on groups that are often excluded from the physical and educational systems (especially girls, children with disabilities and children from low-income families).
"The idea is to use skateboarding as a tool, to combine it with a learning program, not to compete with public schools, but to make it more effective." By 2009, 120 students from Kabul's communities and orphanages were involved in Skateistan, and in October of the same year, the skateboarding center left the streets to open the first indoor venue as a safe haven from terrorist attacks and threats of violence.
Skateboarding spirit also crosses gender. "The girl also came. I noticed that they had never participated in any kind of sport, but skateboarding was allowed by their parents and tolerated by strangers because it did not fit into any known category. Rules cannot prohibit things that social norms do not cover. Oliver Percovich said.
It was The first skate park in Afghanistan, and it also featured a classroom with a blackboard and a row of benches. By the end of 2020, girls make up 42 percent of the skateboard club's nearly 500 students. In the Oscar-winning documentary short Film "Girls' Field Skateboarding Lessons," the skateboard girls became the protagonists.
Before skateboarding, perhaps many of them never thought they could have the right to choose their lives. But skateboarding really changed the group of girls, and at the end of the documentary, each girl spoke a free, sparkling dream in front of the camera.
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