INTERVIEW | 'Why Should Love Be A Transgression?' Nidhi Saxena On Her Venice-Premiered Secret Of A Mountain Serpent
Following world premiere of Secret Of A Mountain Serpent at Venice Film Festival 2025, Nidhi Saxena talks about love, longing, and women of her film.
By Minal Rudra
Published : September 4, 2025 at 12:11 PM IST
“Fabulous,” is the word filmmaker Nidhi Saxena uses to describe the night her second feature, Secret of a Mountain Serpent, premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. “The best feedback is always when a woman comes and tells you, ‘I felt this was my story.’ That happened with my first film (Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman) too. And here in Venice, it happened again. Women came, gay people came, and they said they felt like it was their story. Nothing can come close to that feeling, when you realise cinema is a way of sharing our lives with someone sitting in another part of the world," Nidhi tells ETV Bharat in a virtual chat from Venice.
The film had a grand debut opening the Biennale College Cinema program. The screening was attended by its lead actors Adil Hussain and Trimala Adhikari, Cannes-winning producer Vimukthi Jayasundara, executive producers Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal, and producer Rahul Saxena. It was a landmark moment for Nidhi as she became the first Indian woman to receive the Biennale College Cinema fund.
“I think the idea came to me more than ten years ago when I was working in Uttarakhand,” Nidhi recalls. “I lived in Almora for a while, and I noticed something. Most of the young men joined the army or migrated elsewhere for work. I saw so many women, wives of soldiers, and mothers of soldiers, who were waiting endlessly. Even if there was no war, the men only came home once or twice a year. That absence of men in the mountains struck me very deeply."
That prolonged waiting, she says, became the backdrop against which she began to imagine Secret Of A Mountain Serpent. Set during the 1999 Kargil War, the film follows Barkha (Trimala Adhikari), a schoolteacher in a Himalayan town emptied of men, whose world is unsettled by the arrival of Manik Guho (Adil Hussain), a mysterious outsider. His presence revives the myth of a serpent waiting in the river, stirring both fear and desire.
“I conceived the story ten years back,” Nidhi says. “I wrote a synopsis, then a treatment, and kept visualising it. But the actual screenplay I wrote in Venice, in December 2024 and January 2025."
Secret of a Mountain Serpent is an anti-war film, but at the same time it is about the freedom to love and to desire. Nidhi insists the two themes are more connected than one might think. “These two things rarely come together, but for me they are deeply connected. To allow yourself to fall in love itself is a sign of an open and liberated society. When I was growing up in Jaipur, which was still a town then, I saw that my friends were not easily allowing themselves to fall in love. Because of society, because of their own moral pressures, they thought love was not morally good. Even women who married for love often carried guilt, as if they had done something morally wrong. That fascinated me. Why should love be a transgression?”
Through Barkha, the filmmaker says she aimed to play this conflict sharply. “Her husband is not a bad man. He is not violent, he does not beat her, he does not fight with her. He is like a normal Indian husband. She doesn’t hate him. At some point she must have loved him. When the outsider arrives, she is drawn to him. She is in that moral crisis. Can she love two people at once? Should she stay with her husband, or should she listen to her desire? That confusion is very real for many women.”
“Barkha is someone whose husband is not present. And even when he is present physically, he is not truly present,” Nidhi says. “I have seen many women around me go through this. Women often talk about their inner crises with each other, not with the men in their lives. Their friendships are deeper and more meaningful. I have seen women say, even when the man is home, he is not really there. Barkha comes from those stories. Maybe she comes from me also.”
This focus is not incidental. “When women tell stories, they naturally centre women. In literature I always noticed...men write poetry about women, but rarely do women write about men. Women write about themselves, their gaze is different. That is what I wanted to bring.”
At its heart, Secret of a Mountain Serpent is about desire. The recurring hiss that threads through the film is not just an ominous sound, but a reminder of looming danger. “Desires are risky,” Saxena explains. “When you follow them, you risk everything, and you cannot blame anyone else because you wanted to follow what your heart says. That hiss reminds us of both the temptation and the danger.”
The symbolism of apples and snakes are recurring motifs in the film. “Snakes are universally linked to sexual desire. And the story of Adam and Eve is something we all know. Apples and serpents are visually sensual, immediate metaphors. Even the act of biting an apple becomes an act of biting into something forbidden. But also, they are so sensual, so visual, that they became the perfect language for what I wanted to say.”
That language extends to the way the film sounds. The dialogues are often delivered in hushed tones, almost like gossip. “In my story, all the wives are cheating wives,” Saxena says candidly. “These are conversations that exist in whispers, in half-truths... never spoken aloud. I wanted the audience to feel like they were eavesdropping on secrets.”
Unlike most indie films, music plays an integral role here. With Ram Kumar Singh’s lyrics and soul-stirring compositions by Nishant Ramteke and Ananyaa Gaur, sung by Rekha Bhardwaj and Swanand Kirkire, the soundtrack deepens the inner lives of the characters. "I grew up watching Hindi films where music was inseparable from storytelling. I love Satyajit Ray and Mani Kaul, but I also grew up on Tezaab and Pyaasa. For me, songs are not decoration… I wanted to use them to carry the narrative forward."
One of the striking moments comes when Barkha suddenly turns to the camera, breaking the fourth wall. She asks Nidhi if she has started loving Manik, what happened that she fell for him, and whether they will meet again. Nidhi explains, “When Barkha speaks, she is not only asking me. She is asking the audience. Why do we fall in love? Can we love two people at the same time? I wanted the audience to confront that question in their own lives.”
Visually, the film is shaped by the synergy between Saxena and cinematographer Vikas Urs. "We had some intense discussions too," she admits with a laugh. "I wanted to move in close, while he came from a more static, observational school. Somewhere in between, we found our language, and every frame began to feel like a painting." Saman Alvitigala’s editing complements Vikas’ observational eye beautifully.
The most powerful moment in the film comes at the end, when a group of women, baring all, steps into the river they had feared all their lives because of the serpent myth. “That scene was debated for three months in the script lab,” Nidhi recalls. “My tutors kept telling me to end the film with that scene, and now I am glad I listened to them.”
On the shoot, she was determined to make the space safe. “For that scene, only women were present, and cinematographer Arshana Ghangrekar stepped in for Vikas. Around 25 to 30 women entered the water together. To make them comfortable, I removed my shirt and stood behind the camera, to show them I was also ready to do this, not just asking them.”
Before the scene, Nidhi asked the women why they had agreed to do the scene which is conventionally bold. Rajini Murmu, a tribal activist and one of the non-actor cast members, gave a striking reply. Nidhi says, "She told me, 'The ultimate threat men and society use to frighten us is to strip us of our modesty and dignity… they say they will strip us naked, take off our clothes. But if we remove our clothes ourselves, what power will they have left to threaten us with?'" Nidhi recalls, "I was amazed and stumped by that thought. In that moment, I felt it was I who was learning from them."
“They felt liberated,” Nidhi recalls. “Some were actors, some were women from tribal political backgrounds. We all got goosebumps. During the shoot of that final sequence, we all broke into conversations about agency over our bodies. How men in our country feel so comfortable walking around in vests, but the same men point fingers at us, saying, 'Oh, your bra strap is showing.' I can still remember those discussions. We shot the scene over two days, back to back, and it was only women on that mountain river. It turned into the most liberating experience for all of us.” After a pause, she concludes, "That moment... it was something beyond cinema."
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