Review: Bali (2025)

Amoli Birewar’s Bali is not merely a sports documentary. It is an inquiry into how patriarchy organises the lives of women so thoroughly that even leisure, ambition, and the simple desire to play a game are subject to negotiation.

At its centre is Sujata, an eighteen-year-old Adivasi girl from the Banjara community in rural Maharashtra, who dreams of becoming a kabaddi champion. Like her, the inspirations of her friends are films such as Dangal, Seetimaarr, and Bigil, which dramatise women breaking into arenas traditionally coded as male. But if Bollywood allows them to imagine themselves as the heroes, the rigid rules of village life insist otherwise. Here, adolescence is little more than a waiting room for marriage, and every choice, whether to join a tournament, travel, or play, is filtered through fathers, grandfathers, and the anticipated in-laws.

Birewar opens the film with a powerful tableau: boys standing at a distance, the camera refusing them the authority of proximity, while the girls confide among themselves within the classroom area. Through these shots, the architecture of patriarchy is revealed in miniature. In the conversations of these sports-aspiring girls, we see how consent is deferred to men, how aspirations are converted into bargaining chips, and how girlhood prematurely collapses into domestic duty. One girl speaks of wanting a participation certificate so she might qualify for a police job. For Sujata, however, the dream is different. Becoming a kabaddi champion and savouring athletic triumph. Yet the fact that such ambitions require paternal approval is not just a plot detail. It is the quiet stranglehold that structures their everyday lives.

What makes Bali radical is its refusal to frame kabaddi as a means of salvation. The film resists the melodramatic arc of the “girl power” narrative, where sport alone rescues women from structural inequality. Instead, the filmmaker keeps us alert to the forces that will not yield. Sujata’s body, lunging across the court, embodies the tension at the heart of rural girlhood in India. For her, it is a movement toward autonomy that is always at risk of being pulled back. Even Sujata’s objective in life, where she briefly imagines herself grappling for control of her own story, reads less as escapism than as a critique. Why must women rely on cinema to imagine possibilities that real life refuses them?

Shot with a disarming realism by cinematographer Usha Bose, the kabaddi match has no triumphant climax. There is no swelling score, no cinematic slow-motion of victory. Instead, we hear the sound of bare feet scraping the floor, the breathless counting of a raid, the muffled roar of the crowd. The effect is bracing. This is not a story of exceptional conquest but of ordinary struggle, in which simply participating in the competition is itself an act of defiance. By the film’s end, the match feels less like a contest of points than a rehearsal for freedom that is fleeting, precarious, but necessary.

Bali does not flatter us with easy resolutions. Its politics lie in its clear-eyed recognition that dreams can be crushed as easily as they are formed, and that the struggle for women’s freedom is not won in stadiums but in the intimate, suffocating spaces of home. What the film demands of us is not that we cheer for Sujata’s courage, but that we confront the social order that makes her victory so improbable in the first place. Sujata, Roshini, Tejaswini, and others are not merely names but embodiments of countless girls whose futures are foreclosed before imagination itself can become a form of agency.

Bali won the award for Best Short Documentary at the 17th IDSFFK.