A Family Drama Over Gender in “Holy Curse”

“Holy Curse,” a new short from the U.S.-based Indian filmmaker Snigdha Kapoor, is punctuated by two instances of roadside urination. “I’ve done that so many times,” Kapoor told me, laughing, on a Zoom call from her home in Jersey City. In the film, one culprit is Radha, an androgynous preteen suffering through the gender codifications of early puberty. Radha and their parents, who live in America, are visiting relatives in India, and the adults view Radha’s queerness as an ancestral “curse” that must be ceremonially lifted. The visual language of the film—marked by claustrophobic shots, handheld closeups, and jump cuts—mirrors Radha’s agitation.

In a simpler story, the uncle who arranges a ritual to cleanse Radha would be the villain. But Kapoor’s fable reflects the knowledge that repressive cultural norms can be enforced even by well-meaning people. The character was inspired by her grandfather, who played a similar role in her own childhood. “I grew up thinking I was a boy,” Kapoor, now thirty-seven, said. In India, in the nineties, she played sports with the boys and mirrored their mannerisms and style. Her father called her beta, or “son,” as a term of endearment. “When my body started changing, my grandfather would say, ‘You can’t talk like this,’ ‘You can’t sit like this,’ ‘You are a girl.’ I didn’t understand what that meant.” The policing came, in part, from a place of fear: in Ghaziabad, where Kapoor was raised, self-expression was a grave matter. “People were shot in broad daylight,” she said. “It was a fine line of, ‘How do you get your point across and not get killed?’ ”

Kapoor got her start in documentary—and, when she moved to New York almost thirteen years ago to work as a cinematographer, she found herself dissatisfied with the narrow scope of stories she was helping to tell. There were no nuanced portrayals of the South Asian diaspora. As a reaction, she said, “I literally taught myself how to write.” In 2023, she returned to India to make “Holy Curse,” which generated unforeseen political complications: after months of searching, the team had received only two audition tapes for Radha. Kapoor recalled parents telling her that they were impressed by the script but that “we don’t want our daughters exposed to these themes.” With days to spare before they were scheduled to shoot, she found her lead: the precocious Mrunal Kashid, who reminded her of her younger self.

For Kapoor, the American approach to such matters had presented a different set of challenges. “When I moved to the U.S., I got this dictionary of labels and vocabulary that would help me understand my identity,” she told me. “But at the same time, it felt very restrictive.” She went on, “If I attach myself to one label, then I try to perform what I feel conforms to that label.” With this in mind, she decided never to name Radha’s experience. Onscreen, it exists as what it is––a collection of realizations, outside of language. While Kapoor acknowledges that Radha is essentially nonbinary, she also wanted to leave them room to grow: “I don’t know how they’re going to feel in ten years.”