A few days before the release of Big Girls Don’t Cry, a series she has created for Amazon Prime Video, Nitya Mehra had posted the trailer of the show on her Instagram handle with the caption ‘Sisterhood, soulmates and so many surprises…’ Set in an all-girls boarding school called Vandana Valley, the plot of the show follows the lives of seven friends who navigate friendships, heartbreaks, rebellion, academics and love.
Mehra is also one of the co-directors along with Sudhanshu Saria, Karan Kapadia and Kopal Naithani. The cast includes Avantika Vandanapu (as Ludo), Akshita Sood (Dia), Dalai (Pluggy), Vidushi (Kavya), Lhakyila (JC), Aneet Padda (Roohi), and Afrah Sayed (Noor) and known names such as Pooja Bhatt, Raima Sen, and Zoya Hussain among others.
Speaking about the show, Mehra says that the reason the show was set in a boarding school was because she didn’t have to look too far – she went to a boarding school as well! “However, I will say this and I don’t think I have said it enough. When is the last time you saw or read something which was telling the tale of 17-year-old girls set in an Indian context? I haven’t seen it or read it in recent times. Yes, we are watching a lot of American stories but where is the Indian experience?” she asks. It is this under-representation of authentic school life and coming-of-age stories that compelled her to make the show, she shares.
The director of the critically-acclaimed Chand Mubarak which was part of the anthology Unpaused and co-director of season 2 of Made in Heaven, Mehra is adept at weaving in multiple themes within the narrative. Although there are a number of themes being addressed in BGDC too, Mehra knew that they wanted a central idea to tie it all together neatly. “If you see the trailer, that central idea comes in Pooja Bhatt’s voice when she asks ‘who are you?’ The show is about identity and I feel that it is the one thing which is true for any character which appears for even two minutes on screen,” she adds.
Mehra believes that it is at the cusp of adulthood when questions about identity start emerging in our minds. “I am still grappling with them and so is everyone else, but that age is really the first time when you are confronted with questions and doubts about your religious identity, sexual identity and your image. It all boils down to ‘who are you’ and that became the through line of the show,” says the filmmaker.
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