Holy Damnation, a new short film by Indian American director Snigdha Kapoor, is punctuated by two incidents of urinating on the road. “I’ve done this many times,” Kapoor told me with a laugh during a Zoom call from her home in Jersey City. In the film, one of the culprits is Radha, an androgynous teenager suffering from the gender codification of early puberty. Radha and their parents, living in America, visit relatives in India, and the adults view Radha's oddity as an inherited “curse” that must be ceremoniously lifted. The film's visual language, marked by claustrophobic shots, close-ups and jump cuts, reflects Radha's excitement.
In a simpler story, the villain would be the uncle who orchestrates Radha's purification ritual. But Kapoor's fable reflects the understanding that oppressive cultural norms can be enforced even by well-intentioned people. The character was inspired by her grandfather, who played a similar role during her childhood. “I grew up thinking I was a boy,” said Kapoor, now thirty-seven. In India in the nineties, she played sports with boys and copied their manners and style. Her father called her betaor “son” as a term of endearment. “When my body started to change, my grandfather said: “You can’t talk like that,” “You can’t sit like that,” “You’re a girl.” I didn't understand what that meant.” Policing came partly from fear: in Ghaziabad, where Kapoor grew up, self-expression was a serious issue. “People were shot in broad daylight,” she said. “It was a subtle phrase: “How to get your point across without getting killed?” »
Kapoor started out in documentary filmmaking, and when she moved to New York to work as a cinematographer nearly thirteen years ago, she found herself dissatisfied with the narrow scope of the stories she helped tell. There was no nuance in the portrayal of the South Asian diaspora. She responded by saying, “I literally learned how to write.” In 2023, she returned to India to film Holy Curse, which led to unforeseen political complications: after months of searching, the team received only two audition tapes for Radha. Kapoor recalls her parents telling her that they were impressed by the script, but “we don't want our daughters to touch on these topics.” A few days before the scheduled shoot, she found her hero: the precocious Mrunal Kashid, who reminded her of her younger self.
For Kapoor, the American approach to such issues presented a different set of problems. “When I moved to the US, I developed a vocabulary of labels and vocabulary that would help me understand my identity,” she told me. “But at the same time it felt very restrictive.” She continued, “If I join one label, I try to perform what I think fits that label.” With this in mind, she decided never to mention Radha's experience. On the screen it exists as it is – a set of implementations outside of language. While Kapoor acknowledges that Radha is inherently non-binary, she also wanted to give them room to grow: “I don’t know. How they will feel like they do in ten years.”
