WASHINGTON — “Girl Rising” began as a 2013 Sundance doc about injustices facing nine girls around the world, from arranged marriages to child slavery. Each story was written by a renowned writer from her native country, including “Slumdog Millionaire” star Freida Pinto of Mumbai, India.
Over the weekend, Pinto visited the National Building Museum in D.C. to mark the International Day of the Girl, partnering with the Global India Fund and some of Bollywood’s biggest stars.
“It’s been a no-turning-back kind of a journey,” Pinto tells WTOP. “I think when you bring the right teams together to draw attention to a cause, you need to look at all aspects of it: the financial aspect of it, the political aspect of it, and the one aspect which cannot be ignored is the creative aspect, which is storytelling. If you cannot get people to change behaviors and mindsets and attitudes, it’s almost going to be impossible for the political, financial and other sectors to make sense.”
Pinto first became involved when director Richard Robbins and creative director Martha Adams asked if she’d voice a small part and sent her a script, which she revised with writer Zoe Green.
“I felt like the one thing we needed to make sure that came across was … that we weren’t in any way making them feel like victims,” Pinto says. “I was making sure that they sounded like real fighters. It’s always so much more inspirational when you support a fighter. Someone who knows, OK, I don’t have all of this right now, but I could get it if you just gave me a little bit of support and help.”
When Pinto sent back the revised script, the producers were pleasantly surprised.
“They were quite surprised. They were like, ‘Oh, we had no idea you would take so much time to actually fix it and work on it and make it your own. And I go, ‘I think that is the point of it,’ especially when a cause is this important to you,” Pinto says. “I hadn’t even watched the film by this point in time and I said yes to doing it. … When you hear passionate people speak about what they really want to achieve with a project … you already know they’re onto something really super.”
After watching the film at Sundance, Pinto approached Executive Producer Holly Gordon, president of the Girl Rising campaign, with an idea to expand the outreach with a spinoff film.
“I walked up to her and I said, ‘Listen, this is all well and good, this is a great film, it’s in English, but how do we make people across the world who don’t speak the same language, who actually may not even relate to every story in this film, how do we make them come on board this Girl Rising campaign for change?’ I said, ‘Do you fancy the idea of taking it to India and translating it into Hindi and doing the exact same thing you did with Hollywood actors but with Bollywood?'”
The answer was a resounding yes, and six months later, Pinto was asked to produce the Indian spinoff version called “Girl Rising: Woh Padhegi, Woh Udegi.”
“I immediately said yes, because I had already put in six months of work trying to figure out what the strategy would be, meeting with the right (public) partners, the right partners in the private sector as well. I thought, this was it. If I was going to do something for India, this would be my big gift back.”
Pinto says Indian girls face far different challenges than those faced by American girls.
“We are steeped in a little more of a cultural barrier situation than America is, for example, certain traditions and certain ideas that are very deep set like female feticide,” Pinto says, describing the longtime problem of Indian parents aborting newborn children just because they’re female.
Once the problem of gender-based feticide is resolved, the next step is to change how girls are educated and afforded career opportunities as they become teenagers and young adults.
“There are these traditional ideas in India that after the age of 15 or 16 … her body is getting ready for marriage and pregnancy,” Pinto says. “It’s very, very hard for families who have not seen the other side of it to believe that it is possible to let the girl be unmarried for as long as she wants so that she can go out and do what she really wants in life, career wise, and that can actually be beneficial back to the family. It’s a proven fact that girls who work and earn money invest back into their family.”
Girl Rising says the stats are overwhelming proof. If India enrolled just one percent more girls in secondary school, the nation’s GDP would rise by $5.5 billion. We repeat: $5.5 billion. This economic boost would help inspire parents who are ready to take the social leap, but are financially afraid.
“There are parents in India who don’t want their girls to be married at the age of 13 and 18, but the problem is they have monetary issues. They don’t know how to help the girl child complete their education and, in some cases, the dowry system bogs them down quite a lot. So I feel it’s a web of very treacherous issues, but if we tackle it one by one … we’ve really achieved something.”
The timing of Pinto’s D.C. visit is fitting, arriving the same weekend as the release of the new documentary “He Named Me Malala” by Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim. The film follows the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize recipient, 18-year-old Pakistani native Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban just for advocating for girls education.
“I met Davis actually while he was filming the last part of the Malala documentary at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo,” says Pinto, who presented Malala on stage. “We really hope stories like ‘He Named Me Malala,’ stories like ‘Girl Rising’ … will be enough to open that first initial conversation about … ‘Am I doing enough for my own family in terms of giving back value to the girl child?'”
Pinto says it’s not just a girls issue. It’s also a boys issue. Altogether, it’s a human issue.
“What affects girls eventually will affect boys as well. I think girls should be allowed to choose whether they want to be future mothers, but if the common belief is that girls are future mothers … imagine the impact they will have or not have on their boys if they are not educated! … (That) cannot happen if only women are fighting this fight. It’s counterproductive. It’s also very polarizing. … We need all these amazing men to continue standing tall for us and encouraging other men.”
Overall, it’s a conversation we can each have within our own families to pass to future generations.
“As much as we say, ‘I don’t wanna do that the way my mom did it, I don’t wanna be my dad, I don’t wanna be my mother,’ irrespective you end up emulating their ways. So I feel it’s so important for parents to also be part of this whole education conversation, so that they can be great role models for their own children, and vice versa, so that children can be great role models for their parents.”
Indeed, Pinto’s parents would be proud. The actress and activist — who turns 31 on Oct. 18 — has accomplished a lot in just three decades. And it was all made possible by her breakthrough role in the smash Best Picture winner “Slumdog Millionare” (2008), directed by Danny Boyle.
“He was my first teacher. My first director,” Pinto says. “When I did ‘Slumdog,’ I was completely clueless. … I was all of 22 years old. Someone said there’s this film you’re going to audition for, and I didn’t even know it was a Danny Boyle film. I go in there and within a matter of a year, my entire life had changed. … Every other film is important, but nothing will compare what ‘Slumdog’ did for me.”
Pinto says she’s learned a lot from Boyle, whose “Steve Jobs” biopic hits D.C. theatres on Friday.
“I think his biggest strength is fearlessness. I don’t think that man fears anything when he makes a movie,” Pinto says. “It’s not easy to say, ‘I will take this risk and take ownership for this risk.’ He goes right into it. There is no fear about how people are going to take it. That’s how creativity can really be nurtured among young boys and girls as well. Teach them to make a fearless decision.”
To Pinto, her fiction film projects and her social activism are now intertwined.
“The lines have blurred and it’s 50/50,” Pinto says. “I need the films, I need that cache in order for something like Girl Rising to be popularized. We all know when it comes to social change and subject matters that are a little more hard hitting … you need to give them something that is inspirational. And in order to draw them to something that is inspirational, you need to have cache. They go hand-in-hand. … The better I do at (my film) work, the better I can be at Girl Rising.”
Click here to find out more on Girl Rising. Listen to the full interview with Freida Pinto below:
