Holy Curse’s Oscar run may be over, but the 16-minute film wins where it really counts

About a week after The New Yorker posted Snigdha Kapoor’s short film, Holy Curse, on their YouTube channel, commenter StrategicThinker007, true to the pseudonym, posed a question: “Nice movie and acting,” they wrote, “but after watching it, shall I laugh or cry?” Chances are, you’ll do both, because Kapoor manages to pack a hard punch into those 16 minutes. The story is simple: an adolescent named Radha, who could be trans or non-binary (we’re never explicitly told) but definitely does not identify as a girl, is coerced to perform a puja that’s meant to ‘cleanse’ them of this ‘affliction.’ The culprits behind the cleansing are Radha’s overbearing, culturally regressive uncle, their mild-mannered father who is powerless against his elder brother, and their well-meaning but unhelpful mother. Radha’s cousin Bittu tags along, tormenting Radha at first but then proving to be their greatest ally.

“The family dynamic is something that we have seen in our own families,” shares Kapoor from her home in New York City, neck-deep in a press junket following the film’s inclusion in The New Yorker’s Screening Room. “When I was growing up in India, I went through what Radha was going through. My father used male pronouns for me, I referred to myself with male pronouns, it was very fluid.” Along with this sense of gender fluidity, Radha also inherits Kapoor’s cultural hyphenation. Although the film is set in India (shot in Vasai-Virar) with all the other characters speaking Hindi, Radha talks almost exclusively in English–partially because they’re growing up in the United States but primarily as a way of rejecting the society that’s rejecting them.