Ruse: The Early Exploration of Sexuality

Ruse beautifully captures the complexity of adolescence and sexual curiosity. What inspired you to explore this moment in the lives of young girls?
This project draws its inspiration from my first memory of keeping a secret. I first began writing Ruse in 2020 in the pandemic. Confined to my home in Noida, I kept revisiting the same corners of my house and spent a lot of time staring out of my balcony at the empty swimming pool in my neighbour’s yard. The pool brought back a particular lazy afternoon I had spent there. I and a few girls from our neighbourhood would invent make believe games in that yard. On one such occasion, when I was pretending to be a boy, we all became aware of a certain closeness to our bodies, a physical curiosity. The platonic touch had transformed into something more, a shared wordless desire that we did not have words for. In that moment, we became aware that we were dangling somewhere between innocence and awareness. It urged me to explore what desire looks like when it is pursued in hiding and Ruse came out of it.

What were the challenges of directing three children on this theme?
Initially, I was very nervous about directing young actors. But it became the most fruitful and joyous part of the process. I realised early on that I would have to shed any jargon, analysis or intellectualisation I had of the film and instead transform the process into play.

To prepare, I first rehearsed with three adult actresses and together, we explored the beats of the script. In this rehearsal, I allowed myself to intellectualise the film and articulate what wasn't working till we refined each beat. Once I had distilled each moment down into a feeling rather than an abstract idea, I was ready to work with my young actors.

We rehearsed for a week. In these rehearsals, it was the three young girls, my two choreographers, our intimacy coordinator and my collaborator Mehak Matharu. We spent a lot of time playing with the young actors so they felt invited to have fun and experiment on set. This also helped to build trust. Our intimacy coordinator, Parinaz Aga, conducted consent workshops in which we arranged ourselves in teams and learned about boundaries—how to say no, how to recognize an uncomfortable touch, and how to articulate and voice discomfort. This helped tremendously because we wanted the young actors to eventually feel free enough to voice anything they didn't want to do to a team of adults on set. It was wonderful! We had our brilliant collaborator Aastha Khanna on set and we played games, experimented and genuinely, just had so much fun. Working with these actors also pushed me to find joy, trust my intuition and invite my inner child to set. The entire thing felt divinely guided and I learnt alot from them. They are the best actors I've ever worked with.

The setting of a rainy afternoon and the girls rummaging through Revati’s mother's things adds an interesting layer to the story. How did you use the setting to reflect their emotional journey?
The setting evolved organically. On the first day of our two-day shoot, I realized the script, as it was, wouldn’t work. Originally, the film centered entirely on the dance sequence, but as we began filming, I saw that what I was capturing on camera held a different, more expansive tonality than what I had envisioned. I understood then that the film needed to stretch over an entire boredom-filled day—one in which these three young girls, left to their own devices, attempt to fill time.

My collaborator, Mehak, immediately understood this shift. She transformed a mirror in one of the rooms into Revati’s mother’s mirror. We brought the girls in front of it and encouraged them to play and to lose themselves in make-believe. This process brought back memories of my own childhood—of afternoons spent with my sister in front of our mother’s mirror, trying to catapult ourselves beyond our years and into our imagined versions of womanhood.

The rain became an unexpected gift, heightening the feeling of isolation. It created a world where the absence of adults, the quiet of the house, and the unstructured nature of time allowed hidden desires to rise to the surface. The setting itself became an intimate, secret space—one where the boundaries between childhood and adolescence, innocence and awareness, began to blur.

Why did you choose dance as a form to explore sensuality in the film?
That choice I think was mostly autobiographical. As a child, I spent countless afternoons inventing dances with my sister. Since she was older, I was always assigned the role of the 'boy.' I remember rehearsing movements over and over again, not fully understanding why certain gestures felt so important to us or why without saying it, we would rehearse certain beats again and again. I felt intrigued by that.

Dance is fluid, physical, and intuitive. At that age, it was one of the only mediums through which closeness, attraction, and play could intertwine. So it felt fitting that I also use it as a tool in cinema to explore the themes I had on my mind.

How do you see Ruse contributing to the broader conversation on the complexities of early sexual exploration in film?
The impulse to make Ruse came from a deep personal need—I had never seen the complexities of early sexual exploration between young brown girls reflected in cinema. For a long time, I looked back on my own experiences with judgment, as if I had sinned and as something to feel guilty about. The reason the film is titled ‘Ruse’ is also to reflect this idea that it seemed possible to explore this desire only through trickery and deception. As a child, I thought I was alone in that experience and felt isolated. But looking back on it as an adult, I knew that couldn’t be true.

Childhood is a time before labels, before rigid binaries of right and wrong. It’s a space where consent exists, even when we lack the language for it. I wanted Ruse to honor that complexity.

I wanted the film to tread the delicate space between innocence and awareness, to offer a perspective that was neither voyeuristic nor moralizing, but instead, tender and compassionate. My hope is that women watching Ruse might find echoes of their own memories—perhaps ones they’ve buried in shame—and, for a moment, allow themselves to see those experiences with understanding rather than guilt.


Words Paridhi Badgotri
Date 10.03.2-25