A Family Drama Over Gender in “Holy Curse”

“Holy Curse,” a caller abbreviated from the U.S.-based Indian filmmaker Snigdha Kapoor, is punctuated by 2 instances of roadside urination. “I’ve done that truthful galore times,” Kapoor told me, laughing, connected a Zoom telephone from her location successful Jersey City. In the film, 1 culprit is Radha, an androgynous preteen suffering done the sex codifications of aboriginal puberty. Radha and their parents, who unrecorded successful America, are visiting relatives successful India, and the adults presumption Radha’s queerness arsenic an ancestral “curse” that indispensable beryllium ceremonially lifted. The ocular connection of the film—marked by claustrophobic shots, handheld closeups, and leap cuts—mirrors Radha’s agitation.

In a simpler story, the uncle who arranges a ritual to cleanse Radha would beryllium the villain. But Kapoor’s fable reflects the cognition that repressive taste norms tin beryllium enforced adjacent by well-meaning people. The quality was inspired by her grandfather, who played a akin relation successful her ain childhood. “I grew up reasoning I was a boy,” Kapoor, present thirty-seven, said. In India, successful the nineties, she played sports with the boys and mirrored their mannerisms and style. Her begetter called her beta, oregon “son,” arsenic a word of endearment. “When my assemblage started changing, my gramps would say, ‘You can’t speech similar this,’ ‘You can’t beryllium similar this,’ ‘You are a girl.’ I didn’t recognize what that meant.” The policing came, successful part, from a spot of fear: successful Ghaziabad, wherever Kapoor was raised, self-expression was a sedate matter. “People were changeable successful wide daylight,” she said. “It was a good enactment of, ‘How bash you get your constituent crossed and not get killed?’ ”

Kapoor got her commencement successful documentary—and, erstwhile she moved to New York astir thirteen years agone to enactment arsenic a cinematographer, she recovered herself dissatisfied with the constrictive scope of stories she was helping to tell. There were nary nuanced portrayals of the South Asian diaspora. As a reaction, she said, “I virtually taught myself however to write.” In 2023, she returned to India to marque “Holy Curse,” which generated unforeseen governmental complications: aft months of searching, the squad had received lone 2 audition tapes for Radha. Kapoor recalled parents telling her that they were impressed by the publication but that “we don’t privation our daughters exposed to these themes.” With days to spare earlier they were scheduled to shoot, she recovered her lead: the precocious Mrunal Kashid, who reminded her of her younger self.

For Kapoor, the American attack to specified matters had presented a antithetic acceptable of challenges. “When I moved to the U.S., I got this dictionary of labels and vocabulary that would assistance maine recognize my identity,” she told me. “But astatine the aforesaid time, it felt precise restrictive.” She went on, “If I connect myself to 1 label, past I effort to execute what I consciousness conforms to that label.” With this successful mind, she decided ne'er to sanction Radha’s experience. Onscreen, it exists arsenic what it is––a postulation of realizations, extracurricular of language. While Kapoor acknowledges that Radha is fundamentally nonbinary, she besides wanted to permission them country to grow: “I don’t cognize how they’re going to consciousness successful 10 years.”