As Kicking Balls premières on Prasar Bharati’s OTT platform, director Vijayeta Kumar on how streamers turned down her child marriage docu despite Oscar winner Guneet Monga backing it
A still from Kicking Balls
Director Vijayeta Kumar’s Kicking Balls recently premiered on Prasar Bharti’s newly launched OTT platform, Waves. But releasing the documentary – which explores how certain Rajasthan villages are combating child marriage by training girls in football – was tough despite Oscar winner Guneet Monga Kapoor backing it, says the director. It all started in 2018 when Kumar saw a football camp in Ajmer while passing by her school one day. “I saw many girls playing football. I was impressed by the NGO Mahila Jan Adhikar working with these girls. I pitched the docu’s concept to Guneet; this was when she had just won the Oscar for Period: End of Sentence [2018]. Then Ashwini [Yardi, producer] came on board because she champions this cause. I was lucky funding-wise, but after that, it was very hard to get [it released] despite Guneet’s Oscar and all the connections. The mainstream platforms didn’t want documentaries,” she recalls.
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(From left) Guneet Monga Kapoor and Vijayeta Kumar
After years of pitching the project to OTT giants, the makers finally found a home in Prasar Bharti. But Kumar says it was greenlit only after a few cuts. “They asked us to censor a couple of things, [including] a clip of a local MLA saying that he backs child marriage,” she reveals.
Kicking Balls chronicles how Rajasthan’s young girls use football as a tool to build their confidence and reclaim their agency, to raise their voice against child marriage. Having spent years researching the subject, Kumar says the social evil continues in 2024 due to economic strain. “Poverty is the root cause. People have a lot of kids, like this girl Anu who is in the film, her parents have 10 children, they have 9 daughters and then 1 son. There is this tradition in her community that if an elderly person dies, like a grandfather, they have to do this whole thing where you have to give a feast to the whole village. They try to save money and think - we are spending on this, so let's just marry off girls also in the same event, so that you don't have to spend on food again. If somebody in the family is getting married so that again becomes a reason to (Do this). They think it's okay because they are not sending the girls to the husband's house. They only go after puberty, but then they don't have to spend money on a wedding all over again and all that, so that's, so poverty is definitely like the biggest reason for it.”
Kumar says that bifurcation of agency in rural India is something the film taught her. “Football is a very aggressive sport. Normally, you empower the girls by teaching them embroidery but imagine an NGO saying - let’s go full out and teach them football. The sport has enabled them, even in their daily lives, to just focus better on their studies. It's given them this whole drive that we want to get out of this.”
There is a fiction that’s come to them from the film and something she is developing. “We are sort of working on it. There is an idea I have. But you know, with fiction right now, you cast a big star. Most of these girls are from a lower caste background. They are Adivasis, they are Dalits. And you know, then the idea of, again just casting a Savarna person. It's basically just appropriating their story. But it will be a whole different battle when we get to it.”
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