Kani Kusruti The World Under Her Feet

The critically-acclaimed Malayalam actor's film Girls Will Be Girls has just won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Indian Film Festival Of Los Angeles. This, after her All We Imagine As Light picked up the Grand Prix at Cannes

- Ananya Ghosh

Kani Kusruti is probably the best-known fresh Indian face today after the country's exquisite run at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. Two of her films, Shuchi Talati's Girls Will Be Girls and Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light were screened at the festival to packed houses with the latter even picking up the Grand Prix. More recently, it was Girls Will Be Girls that got another moment in the sun when it picked up the Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Indian Film Festival Of Los Angeles—a unique platform that brings independent films coming out of South Asia and its diaspora to the Los Angeles audience—after winning Grand Jury prizes at Transylvania International Film Festival in Romania and Biarritz Film Festival in France. We spoke to the Malayalam actor of international repute, who has two webseries and a movie coming up, about cinema, female representation, artistic freedom, and more. Excerpts:

Tell us something about Girls Will Be Girls. How was the character on paper and what was the most challenging part about playing the watchful parent in the coming-of-age drama?

Sometimes, some scripts don't immedliately click or connect to me. Girls Will Be Girls was one such. | was not really understanding this relationship between the mother and daughter. | have never seen or experienced anything like it. | still understood the daughter's character a bit but not the one I was playing, the mother's. It didn't help that | have not experienced motherhood in real life! It was after having multiple conversations with Suchi and rehearsing with my co-actor Preeti (Preeti Panigrahi) that I kind of started to connect with the character. So, Anila was a character that unravelled itself slowly to me. It was very challenging to understand her and play her but it was an actor's journey that I really enjoyed.

Girls Will Be Girls had a women crew. How was that experience?