Docu-filmmaker Vijayeta Kumar on ‘Kicking Balls’, fighting child marriage with football, and more

Vijayeta Kumar, the director of the documentary short ‘Kicking Balls’, talks about the journey of chronicling the struggle of girls in Rajasthan resisting child marriage, and Bollywood’s under-representation of women behind the camera

In a remote village in Ajmer, about 300 girls have taken to the sport of football to fight child marriage. For her latest documentary short, Kicking Balls, Vijayeta Kumar and her all-women crew have made their way to the football grounds to shine the spotlight on these young players.

On a trip to her hometown, Vijayeta stumbled upon a group of girls playing football in her school’s playground. “My school did not have a football team, so I was intrigued to know who was playing and why,” the director quips over a telephone call. 

When informed that it was a venture by ‘Mahila Jan Adikar Samiti’ (MJAS), an NGO in Ajmer that has been operational for over 30 years to fight child marriage, her intrigue only grew. “Upon speaking to people associated with the project, I discovered that when the conventional campaigns to fight child marriage, which mainly included creating awareness among the parents, did not work, the organisation took to sports,” she says. “Through football, which is conventionally regarded as an aggressive sport associated with boys, the organisation wanted to instil qualities like assertion and confidence in the girls.”

The director feels pertinent to relay the socio-economic background the girls live under and fight against. “People living in villages in Rajasthan suffer from poverty and patriarchy. Female children are unwanted and often married at an early age to boys roughly around the same age. In most cases, neither the boys nor the girls want to live with each other. Sometimes, these kids are as young as three! While they are sent to their husbands’ houses only after they hit puberty, they are being taught to resist the practice from a very young age by the organisation.” She adds, “Some of the older girls have successfully got their marriages annulled and the younger ones are refusing to move to their husbands’ houses.”

The girls who frequent the playground after school are very vocal about their condition and Vijayeta’s familiarity with fellow villagers helped them open up. “I approached them with empathy, kindness and love,” the director says.

The project, whose roots can be traced all the way back to 2016, started with 100 girls. Now, with 300, they have made their presence in the Under-17 State and National teams. Initially, their gains were incremental but their resilience saw them through — from fighting for the freedom to play the sport in shorts to daring to dream of making careers for themselves. “Now they roam around the village in shorts,” the director heartily remarks.

In the process of relaying their story to the world, Vijayeta is brewing a small rebellion behind the scenes. “I was very particular about having an all-women crew,” she notes. Exposed to feminist professors and writers like Germaine Greer during her college days, she is adamant about having women behind the camera. “Though women are present in the make-up departments, they make up less than 2% of cinematographers and 6% of directors in Bollywood,” the director quips.