In a village in the hills, women wait for their husbands while eating apples and dodging snakes

When Nidhi Saxena walked on the red carpet for the premiere of her film Secret Of A Mountain Serpent in Venice earlier this year, she had an apple in her hand.

The juicy red fruit features in Saxena’s debut Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman in 2024 and more prominently in Secret Of A Mountain Serpent. When Saxena was pitching for a grant for Secret Of A Mountain Serpent at the Venice Film Festival the previous year, she took along an apple and bit into it before the selectors.

Snakes too are important in Secret Of A Mountain Serpent – but it would have been difficult to brandish a live specimen on the Venice red carpet.

“I wanted to play with the metaphors and legends about apples and snakes across cultures,” Saxena told Scroll. “I wanted the apple in particular to transport the characters to a place of love rather than hell. You meet the love of your life. The apple makes you content in every way.”

Saxena’s fascination for fruit and reptiles is partly inspired by the creation myth in Christianity, she said. In Secret Of A Mountain Serpent, which was premiered in India at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (October 30-November 2), a local legend about a snake-infested river warns the wives of men who are away to remain faithful and decorous. The apples that are scattered about are like forbidden fruit, tempting them but liberating them too.

The Hindi-language film is set during the Kargil War in 1999, in a remote part of Uttarakhand’s Almora district. Barkha (Trimala Adhikari) feels strangely detached from her husband (Pushpendra Singh) when he eventually returns. Instead, Barkha is attracted to the enigmatic engineer Manik (Adil Hussain).

Like her previous movie, Saxena’s sophomore effort is marked by abstract imagery, lengthy takes, silences and a poetic approach to the unique concerns of women. There are elements of magic realism in both films.

In Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman, an elderly woman’s past enters her present. In Secret Of A Mountain Serpent, talking shoes express the desires of women cut off from their partners. Birds of passage carry messages between the absent men and the pining women.

At least 200 kilograms of apples were used in Secret Of A Mountain Serpent. About the film’s themes, Saxena said, “Women are not allowed to love or have sexual pleasure easily, even with their husbands. I wanted to explore repressed desire, its erotic aspects, a hushed sub-culture of secret lovers that isn’t expressed directly but through symbols and metaphors.”

Trimala Adhikari, who powerfully portrays the questing heroine Barkha, was cast not only because of her proven talent but also because she is from the region where the story plays out.

“She is a very good and subtle actor, her emotions are not on the nose,” Saxena said about Adhikari. “She expresses herself through silences. She is very composed.”

Saxena had previously met Adhikari when the actor visited the Film and Television Institute of India’s campus in Pune. Saxena studied screenwriting at FTII, joining the course when she was in her thirties.

The 38-year-old filmmaker was born and raised in Jaipur. Her diverse background includes an education in painting and sculpture and jobs with non-profit organisations. All along, Saxena nurtured her ambition to engage with cinema.

“Even as a child, whenever I used to read stories, I would visualise and reconstruct them in my head,” Saxena said. “I felt that I didn’t make a film, I would die.”

Apart from literature, she was influenced by the films of such mavericks as Andrei Tarkovsky, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Federico Fellini, Agnes Varda and Tsai Ming-liang. “These filmmakers experimented with different ways to tell their stories,” Saxena said. “I survived because of these films.”

In order to fund Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman, Saxena says that she sold her apartment in Jaipur, alongside relying on the generosity of family members and friends. Fortunately for her, the noted Sri Lankan filmmaker Vimukthi Jayasundara – himself an FTII alum and a guest lecturer at the institute – stepped in as a producer for Sad Letters. Jayasundara also co-produced Secret Of A Mountain Serpent.

Jayasundara’s backing along with Saxena’s industry has led to back-to-back projects that have premiered at Busan and Venice respectively – a remarkable achievement, given the obstacles faced by independent filmmakers in financing, festival exposure and distribution.

“It’s unusual and it’s really fast,” Saxena said. “To make a film within 10 months like I did with Secret Of A Mountain Serpent – I probably won’t do it again.”

Slow-burning arthouse cinema of the kind that Saxena likes to watch and make has always been imperilled and especially more so now, she observed. The film festival is the natural destination for movies that eschew exposition for non-conventional, visual-heavy storytelling.

However, the competition is fierce, festival programming is not as bold as it used to be, and there are preconceived notions about Indian filmmakers, Saxena added.

“For many international programmers, India is still a developing country, a place of poverty and magic,” she said. “Even their indie films are big productions, whereas our indie films are very small, like kids playing in their backyards.”

Even while she attends the Dharamshala festival, Saxena is preparing for her third project, which she promises will be “more accessible” than her previous works. She will also be writing Vimukthi Jayasundara’s upcoming Kochi-set movie.

Alongside filmmaking, Saxena has been writing books, including a biography of Fatma Begum, considered the first Indian woman to write and direct films in the 1920s. Saxena hopes to adapt Who was Fatma Begum?, written for young readers, for the screen.

“I want to make an experimental film about this very brave woman,” Saxena said. “I am tired of watching women by men. Except for a few directors, Indian cinema generally has poorly written female characters. It’s important for women to start looking at themselves. We may get offended by the label ‘woman filmmaker’, since nobody says ‘male filmmaker’. But we need to fight this with the consciousness of our identity as women.”