Skater Girl

Built from a conversation with Vinati Makijany, August 2026.

The record

What was built

Desert Dolphin Skatepark — 14,500 sq ft, reinforced concrete, Khempur, Rajasthan

Scale

One of India's largest; the first that part of Rajasthan had ever seen (per filmmakers)

Built in

45 days during monsoon season, 2018, by 100 Ramps (Darius Bharucha) with international volunteers

Park opened

October 2018, before filming began (wrap spring 2019)

Financing

Independent — private equity. Netflix acquired the finished film (streaming June 2021)

Local hiring

More than 350 local people employed on the production

Children impacted

Hundreds trained, including 35 girls (2021); foundation reports thousands since 2018

National championship

Four Khempur skaters carried Rajasthan, April 2021

Stewarded by

Living Grace Foundation (Vinati Makijany, Founder & Managing Trustee)

Production company

Skatepark Films, in association with Mac Productions.

Still active

Eight years on the ground; a documentary in the cut; a foundation now opening to support

The correction the record needs

Almost everything written about Skater Girl calls it a Netflix film. It was not. The sisters made it independently, financing it themselves and through a private investor, and Netflix acquired the finished film only after seeing it complete. "We made it independently. Netflix came on board when they saw a finished film." The distinction matters more than a footnote, because it changes the meaning of what they did. This was not a streaming giant underwriting a philanthropic gesture out of a marketing budget. It was two sisters and their family making this happen and spending their own money , "every penny that you have has to be spent so mindfully" and choosing, at real personal cost, to pour a permanent skatepark into a village that had never seen one. The generosity was not corporate. It was theirs.

How it began

It began, as the best of these stories do, with a refusal to separate the art from the care.

The Makijany sisters grew up in Bombay in a bungalow across from a Catholic church, daughters of the celebrated Bollywood actor Mac Mohan, a man who had appeared in over two hundred films and who rehearsed Shakespeare in the mornings, treating his body, as Vinati remembers it, "as an instrument for his art." Their mother is a nurse. "So the art and the care aspect of it became something that we saw in our home," Vinati says, the two halves of who she and Manjari would become, present in the house before either of them chose a thing. As children they crossed the road to help a woman teaching street kids at the church, not out of virtue but because, as Vinati puts it, "we have free time, this is what we should be doing."

Skater Girl was their first feature, Manjari directing, Vinati producing, both sisters co-writing with Manjari's husband and co-producer, Emmanuel Pappas. And when they were writing a story about a girl who discovers skateboarding, Manjari said the thing that would define everything after: "We're talking about building a skate park, we should just build a skate park." Emmanuel agreed on the spot. There was no strategy in it, no plan to be change-makers. "We didn't think this would be a blueprint," Vinati says. "We were just like, okay, yeah, we're doing this."

The instinct was to keep the giving and the making in the same place. Someone offered them land elsewhere in Rajasthan on the condition that others would manage the park after the shoot, and they said no. "We want the place to be a free community space," Vinati says. "We don't want anyone sabotaging that approach." In retrospect, she knows how it looked: "Anyone would consider that a stupid idea, why are you taking on a responsibility for life?" They took it on anyway.

Why Rajasthan, and how they chose

They chose the state on purpose. Rajasthan ranked highest on India's Patriarchy Index, a fact the sisters knew before there was a tidy name for it, because, as Vinati says, "we've spent time in India, we recognize the states where women are treated like second-class citizens." It made cinematic sense and it made sense for impact.

But choosing a state is not choosing a village, and the sisters spent fifteen days driving across Rajasthan carrying two agendas no ordinary location scout carries: a place to shoot, and land to build on. They traveled with a skateboard, watching how children responded to it. And when they reached the village that felt right, they saw something that settled it: the children there had already made their own skateboards, one little boy dragging a plank on ball bearings across the dirt. That improvised board is in the finished film. "When we saw that," Vinati says, "we just felt: this is where the film needs to be set."

The build

The build was real construction, and it was hard. The production brought in 100 Ramps, the Bengaluru firm led by pioneering Indian skater Darius Bharucha assembled a crew of stoked volunteers from across the world, and poured 14,500 square feet of reinforced concrete over 45 days, in the monsoon. It was one of the largest skateparks in India and the first that part of Rajasthan had ever seen. Since then, the skateboarding scene has picked up and now the country boasts of many more skateparks.

The villagers did not know what they were watching. In a desert state, some thought the sisters were building a swimming pool ("where are you going to find the water?"). Someone guessed a parking lot. Someone guessed a mall. Even one of the volunteers building it accused the sisters of only caring about their film, and Vinati remembers the sting of it, wanting to tell him he had no idea what their intentions were. She does not blame him, she says: it was so rare for anyone to do this that he had no reference point for it.

A skate coach was brought in months ahead of the shoot to train not only the actors but the local children, so that by the time filming began the village kids were skating fearlessly, and most of the young skaters in the film are those children, not imported extras. The production hired more than 350 local people. For the climax, the sisters brought in real skateboarders from across India, because, as Vinati says, "we're making a film about skateboarding and it cannot be done without them."

What it asked of her

Here is what the research could never show, and what the film's tidy success story leaves out: the years after.

The park opened in October 2018. The film wrapped in the spring of 2019 and went up on Netflix in June 2021. But for Vinati, that was not an ending, it was the start of an eight-year commitment that is still going. She set up the Living Grace Foundation so that every donation would move through a clean channel. And then she stayed, and met the full weight of what building something in that village actually meant.

She has watched a mother walk into the park with a brick, threatening her own son to make him leave. She has stood in front of a shepherd-community girl who was threatened with being burned alive for the crime of being invited to skate. A farmer once tried to hand her his daughter to raise, "just take my daughter, you'll be able to raise her well" because he could not feed three girls, and she had to find the strength to say no without letting it break her. For years the local men would not meet her eye or speak to her; some addressed her as a man, unused to reporting to a woman. A government official looked her in the face and demanded to know her "selfish agenda" - "why else would you do it?" Two years later, another official told her what she was doing was amazing.

It cost money, too, the kind of cost that does not show up in a budget line. "We've personally broken our savings, our mutual funds, stocks," Vinati says, "and continue to put in this." They are only now, cautiously, beginning to open the work to outside support.

And it changed her. To carry it, she went to INSEAD to study change management, "to even deal with what you do when you have too much empathy." She is now working with a sociologist and a psychologist on a research paper about what a skatepark actually shifts in a village: whether sport can, in her words, "inculcate curiosity, courage, and care." Because that, in the end, is the point, not medals. "We're not trying to train champions. We're not an academy." That some of the Khempur children went on to represent the state is wonderful, but it is not the measure. The measure is whether a child can begin to imagine a different life, the way the girl the sisters met behind a thorn-bush barricade, forbidden to leave her home, had never once been asked what she wanted to do. "No one's ever asked me that question," she told them. That line is in the film.

What is still true

The park never closed. Skateboards and safety gear are still free. The Living Grace Foundation and the Skate Basti Foundation still keep the lights on. And in April 2021, four of its young skaters, the youngest around ten, most of them leaving their village for the first time in their lives carried Rajasthan's colors to the national championship in Mohali.

The sisters are still filming there, too. They have been documenting the village for eight years and are cutting a documentary from it. And they are already doing it again: their next film will be adopting a similar model in southern India, impact designed in from the first day, the same principle, and once again sport is a theme.

Vinati never set out to found a tradition. When told she belonged in a lineage running back a century, from Mary Pickford's relief bucket in 1921 to her own slab in the desert, she recognized it at once. She had simply lived it before anyone gave it a name.

"We wanted to make clear that we're not coming here just to make a movie and go away. We were creating something that was going to live beyond the film."

Vinati Makijany, Producer, Skater Girl, Women's Media Center, June 2021