“When I’m on the ice, the rest of the world doesn’t exist. There are no worries.
I feel like I’m flying,” says Padma Chorol, a star player on India’s national ice-hockey team.
And we lost to every single team. Directed by Mumbai-based Sahil H Shah, it premiered this weekend at the Busan International Film Festival. Like Tashi, she started out with no equipment of her own, and little room for herself in the rink. “It didn’t matter if the stick was taller than me or the skates were too big. “To just get into the rink and play with whoever was practising. All year, while the other children looked forward to summer, she yearned for winters so cold that the lake near her home would freeze over. She wasn’t always the best judge of when that had happened. The desperation was real. There were no artificial rinks in Leh yet (the first one only opened this August), so the brief window of natural ice on natural water bodies was the only time anyone could play. Padma was ecstatic when she was selected. “But we quickly realised how much we still needed to learn.
The 31-year-old is now taking this spirit of fearlessness and freedom to the screen, playing a character quite like herself, in the Ladakhi-language film Birds on Ice. It tells the story of a 10-year-old named Tashi (Semzang Skitdon) who falls in love with the sport after watching others play it, in the frozen winters of her mountain town. Chorol’s character, Paami, is among the players who inspire her to pursue her dream of playing for India on the ice. *** In the real world, Chorol was one of the first members of India’s medal-winning women’s national team, formed in 2016. When she was 10 years old, she took to speedskating, just so she could get onto the ice. By age 15, she was borrowing oversized equipment from her brothers, Nawang Stupdan and Tainang Dorge, both local champions. with a robust club scene, a national championship and a men’s national team established in the 1980s, the Indian women’s team was only formed in 2016 While ice-hockey has been growing in Ladakh since the 1960s. Our first major tournament was the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) Women’s Challenge Cup of Asia Division 1. Chorol scored India’s first international goal in the team’s debut match against Singapore, but they still lost 8-1.
“The two sports are very different, but it helped me develop balance, control and of course speed,” she says. I just felt a drive to be out there,” she says. “One year, I was so impatient that I headed out too early, fell through and had to be rescued,” she says. “It felt like such a big achievement,” she says.
To top it all, she won Player of the Tournament. *** Chorol and her teammates have been interviewed repeatedly. Still, when Shah first approached her to play Paami, “I was so nervous. Two things helped her take the plunge: the fact that she would need to do, for her shoots, largely what she did in real life anyway; and the idea that broadcasting her love for this exhilarating sport might help it get the attention it deserves. It still wasn’t easy. So she often began the day with real practice in the morning, followed by choreographed play for her scenes, with sometimes a break in-between to compete in real tournaments too. Until this year, everything ice-hockey-related had to happen in those few weeks when natural ice formed on water bodies. she was competing in the second edition of the Royal Enfield Ice Hockey League While shooting. One of those games features briefly in the movie too. In the real world, the league team was led by Chorol as captain, and was trailing by two goals. She then scored a hattrick, winning the match and the tournament for Maryul Spamo.
At the 2019 IIHF Women’s Challenge Cup of Asia (Division 1), India won bronze. In 2025, they did it again. *** The team has since drawn attention from the press. Shot in early 2025, work on the film coincided with playing season.
Multiple documentaries have told their story. The idea of making a film felt very daunting,” she says. That’s how it works in Ladakh, she says. “It felt surreal because we were shooting the match for the movie, but the match itself felt like it was scripted in a movie,” Chorol says, grinning.
It would take years of practice, real equipment, and sanctioned time at the rinks, before the wins began to come.
Chorol is now excited to see where the film travels next. Meanwhile, she earns a living running a small café in Leh. She dreams of seeing more girls add her sport to the list of things they want to do when they grow up. “In the decade since our national team was formed, ice-hockey has become popular in other parts of the country as well. We now have artificial rinks in Dehradun and Pune too. Children can now get the training we couldn’t get. Acting has been a fun side-quest, she adds.
“On the national team, we are focused on qualifying for next year’s World Championship,” she says. “It is so much more difficult than playing hockey.”
