The 14,500 sq ft skate park built by the duo near Udaipur

Natasha Coutinho (MUMBAI MIRROR; May 17, 2019)

Arre O Sambha..., the character from Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay, played by the late Mac Mohan, remains memorable even after four decades. Now, Mirror has learnt that his daughters Manjari (writer-director) and Vinati Makijany (co-writer-producer) are all set to make India’s first feature film on skate-boarding, titled Desert Dolphin.

Manjari may be making her B-Town debut with the film, but she is not new to the world of cinema. The LA-based filmmaker has worked for nearly 12 years, directed three short films and won several awards nationally and internationally. She has worked with filmmakers like Christopher Nolan on Dunkirk and The Dark Knight Rises, Patty Jenkins on Wonder Woman and Vishal Bhardwaj on Saat Khoon Maaf, besides other projects like Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Wake Up Sid and Gandhi of the Month.

For her debut, she chose to come back home and make a film with women empowerment at its core. Set in a remote village in Rajasthan, Desert Dolphin is about 16-year-old Prerna, a village girl who finds courage to skate against all odds when her path crosses that of Jessica, 34, a graphic artist from Los Angeles who’s looking for deeper joy in life. For the film, the makers have made India’s largest skatepark, spread across 14,500 square feet with 100 ramps, in the Khempur village near Udaipur with the help of premiere skatepark specialists and the skateboard coaching group HolyStoked Collective.

With skateboarding officially entering the Olympics in 2020 and with no other park of this calibre and design in India, the team hopes that it will serve as a local and international training ground for future champions and add to the growing trend of skate-boarding in the country.

Manjari, who was exposed to the skateboarding culture during her time in LA, says that it was a video of the sport transforming lives in a small Madhya Pradesh village that grabbed her attention. “Upon further research and meeting the skaters there, I realised the concept was inspired by Skateistan in Afghanistan. This led me to dig deeper and I began my research in September 2016, immersing myself in the correlation between skating and social change,” she says.

Vinati, who is producing the film, asserts that the idea was to involve as many real skateboarders as possible in the project. “During auditions, we reached out to the skateboarding communities in India. I travelled to Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, villages in Rajasthan and Mumbai and spent a few days workshopping with over 3000 kids,” she signs off.