Secret of a Mountain Serpent is an abstract, yet assertive work of indie cinema. Directed by Nidhi Saxena, the feature length film screened during the 44th Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), on October 9th 2025, at the Cinematheque. This movie was part of the programme for Focus: Edges of Belonging–a series that highlighted contemporary voices and narratives from India. 

I reached out to VIFF’s guest programmer Deepika Suseelan via email, with a request to share more about her experience putting this programme together. “I watched over a hundred films including official submissions to the festival as well as titles I personally sourced for the programme,” she wrote back. “Prominent themes included internal migration, displacement, identity, womanhood, particularly negotiation of womanhood within patriarchal structures. Despite their diversity, all these narratives seemed to converge on this pivotal question of belonging–what it means, how it is denied or ultimately reclaimed with dignity.”

Secret of a Mountain Serpent taps into regional folklore, myths and biblical themes to examine the breadth and depths of female sensual desire. The movie’s plot transports audiences to the cusp of the second millennium CE, in a Hindi-speaking community that is tucked into a Pahadi town, nestled in the Lower Himalayas.

The protagonist, Barkha (Trimala Adhikari), is the wife of an Indian army soldier named Sudhir (Pushpendra Singh), who is yet to return home after the Kargil War. The movie invites the viewer to glimpse through Barkha’s thoughts, dreams and reality, offering ethereal vignettes of a desolate life. She grapples within the bounds of patriarchy, entangled in a cage of unrequited yearning. The women of the town perform various forms of labour. They seek reassurance and companionship in each other’s whispered presence. One day, Barkha crosses paths with a mysterious stranger, Manik Guho (Adil Husssain), who threads the gaps of her heart with erotic musings. His presence is poetic, ephemeral, and at times imposing. Their interactions harken fantastical forays into Barkha’s forbidden dreams of sensual plurality. 

The quest for belonging–both within oneself and among various agents of control–is rarely explored through a feminine gaze on film. Deepika Suseelan expands, “In a patriarchal society, women are often pushed to the margins and their voices are buried under silence, duty or myth, they are often denied to fully belong, their identities are shaped by the roles imposed upon them. In this film womanhood is not explained, but experienced.” The film’s ambience is moody, but the tale shimmers with soft radiance. Each frame is subversive, skirting the edge of the medium with its dreamlike pacing and disjointed narrative that brim with symbolic abstractions. 

For me, the film’s first scenes landed like a stone thrown into a silent pond. The melancholic color palette of blue, maroon, brown and grey, the looming tree trunks and dense mist that drape towering mountains like shrouds, juxtaposed against female banter unsettled my mind. They brought up confused judgments. I became irked, impatient for the story to unfold. Without familiar anchors like a cohesive plot, crisp visuals and a set of relatable characters to sink my teeth into, I felt thrown out of my comfort zone. Eventually, like Barkha, I accepted a bite of the crunchy, red apple, and took a tentative dip into a cove of repressed emotions.

“...the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough. The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic.”

- Audre Lorde in the essay “The Uses of the Erotic”

Director Saxena’s approach to cinema sits squarely on the erotic plane. It champions a certain kind of expressive storytelling that has been trivialised, often denied in mainstream cinema. This historic exclusion influences the very rational and aesthetic sensibilities of the medium. Many of us feel entitled to homogenized cultural perspectives. Ultimately, such polished narratives tend to aid hegemonic worldviews steeped in capitalist realism, patriarchy and Enlightenment-era ideals. 

In Secret of a Mountain Serpent, the mountains, rivers and tree trunks breathe life onto the screen. Meanwhile, the human characters fade into surreal imprints–a combination of mythical tales, local gossip and forlorn memories. Their dialogues are stripped bare, but the calls of birds and the hisses of serpents echo with folk wisdom. Everyday objects like apples, slippers, and glass bangles tingle with life. Saxena’s experiments with sound and visual design are audacious. Each scene reimagines how bodies, man-made structures and natural features are portrayed on screen. The women in this movie are framed with intrigue, laying emphasis on sprawling silhouettes and enigmatic back profiles. In many scenes, there is more shadow, less light. This approach turns the hilly landscape into unexplored frontiers of embodied knowledge and erotic desire. The ambiguous storytelling invites deeper engagement, egging the viewer on, to mine further and further into the psychic terrains of the film. 

Folktales carry the beating heart of oral traditions and signal any given community’s implicit moral codes. These fables hold the risk of misinterpretation when consumed from a (geographical and cultural) distance. I asked Deepika Suseelan if she has any advice on how to avoid exoticising underrepresented narratives. “It is important to remember that even within a region, interpretations of these stories are diverse and layered. I believe the key to avoiding exoticism lies in contextualization, collaboration and by reshaping the very structures through which stories are created, shared and received,” she opined. 

I agree. While the references to apple trees and Eve in the biblical Garden of Eden feel obvious, there is scope to elaborate on aspects of cultural specificity that shape Barkha’s inner and outer worlds. She is a school teacher and is married to a soldier, both roles that tether her to upholding nationalistic interests. This framing is a deliberate subjectivity–she is someone with caste-based social privilege and access to (post)colonial institutions of knowledge and power. The transitory moments when she seeks to discover her private sense of self, whether by walking through the woods or in a cerebral restaurant located on the mountaintops, spark a departure from the established order. Like a serpent shedding skin, Barkha’s dreams endure despite her uncertain circumstances.

Hindu legends are lush with references to serpents (Nagas) and to snake-like spirits (Nagins), typically seen as anarchic agents of the netherworld. Mythical tales about sisters Kudra and Vinata, and those about serpents Vasuki, Takshaka and Kaliya allude to the region’s proto-history, where Nagas spread terror and chaos before Vedic deities subjugate the limbless reptiles. 

The bygone era might have brimmed with myriad spiritual influences–Vedic fire rituals of Aryan immigrants, Indigenous practices and beliefs of forest-dwellers (including a clan named Nagas) and also, Varnashrama dharma–a caste based order that preaches social segregation based on birth. These contradictory forces wrestled for dominance, ultimately assimilating into a common consciousness. Fragile bulwarks of social agreements between diverse philosophical schools continue to dictate the currents of patriarchy and political elitism, colluding through the ages, to enable massive nation-building endeavors. 

Secret of a Mountain Serpent circumvents the male-centric heroicism of oft-repeated myths and epics. instead handing agency to women, who bear the weight of preserving the land and embodied cultures long after the annihilatory violence of masculine dominion. The rich infusion of folklore reimagines serpents and birds as soulful messengers who help a woman discover her locus of belonging and connection. When husbands become embedded in the latest cycle of imperial aggression, the mountains, trees and river serpents ignite an impassioned subjectivity that symbolises a homecoming of sorts, bringing women to the laps of natural wisdom. 

War propaganda tends to focus on the sacrificial exploits of men. Saxena’s story, however, inverts patriarchal jingoism by embracing the forbidden allure of the mountain serpents.

“Hakka women have a reputation for being strong, stubborn, resilient, practical, and frugal…no-nonsense. That’s a true Hakka woman,” Linda Lau Anusasananan, author of The Hakka Cookbook: Chinese Soul Food from around the World, said.

“And one you don’t want to mess with,” affirmed Kevin Chong, author of The Double Life of Benson Yu.

The packed room roared in laughter in agreement as if they had heard this truth many times before. 

Cheuk Kwan, author of Have You Eaten Yet?, chimed in, saying that four of the fifteen Chinese restaurants around the world he interviewed for his Chinese Restaurant project were run by Hakka women. Their husbands, he joked, were useless.

The audience laughed again.

The evening was a conversation at the Vancouver Public Library with Anusasananan and Kwan, moderated by Chong, and introduced by Judy Lam Maxwell, culinary-heritage tourism entrepreneur, titled Food and the Chinese Diaspora.

Kwan’s trailer for his Chinese Restaurant documentary series opened the night, immersing the audience in the hot, sweaty kitchens of Chinese restaurants across the globe — from Turkey to Brazil to just under the Arctic Circle. Chefs tossed diasporic dishes in fiery woks as scenes flashed across the screen, interspersed with interviews that asked the deeper questions: What does it mean to be Chinese in diaspora? Are we defined by our ethnicity, our nationality, or both? How is the diasporic identity expressed in food?

These questions guided the evening’s conversation as the panelists explored the tensions between being Chinese and how Chineseness is expressed and evolves through food wherever they settle.

Anusasananan shared a presentation on her ethnic identity as a Hakka Chinese person and how her book documenting Hakka food became a way to explore her own culture, which she didn’t know much about until she wrote the cookbook. The Hakka 客家 (“guest families”) are a displaced people who migrated from northern to southern China and then into a global diaspora scattered across Southeast Asia, Mauritius, India, North America, and beyond, often driven by war, famine, and violence from other ethnic groups.

The dandelion, Anusasananan explained, is the symbol of the Hakka people, because “like a dandelion, a Hakka can land anywhere, take root in the poorest soil, and flourish and flower.” Hakka food, she added, is “of the working people” who lived in the mountains, with women of unbound feet working side by side with the men.

She recalled her Hakka grandmother, affectionately called poh pooh 婆婆 in Chinese, who constantly reminded her growing up: “You should be proud to be Hakka.” But Anusasananan admitted candidly that she didn’t think much of it at the time. As the only Chinese student in an all-white school in a small California town where her father started and ran the first Chinese restaurant, being Hakka didn’t feel like something to claim.

After a long career as a food writer at Sunset Magazine, her poh poh’s words lingered. Anusasananan wondered: “What did she mean when she said, ‘You should be proud to be Hakka’?” In retirement, she set out to find out through what she knew best — food.

This journey took her around the world, into restaurants and home kitchens wherever Hakka people lived, observing cuisines and collecting recipes, and trying to capture the essence of Hakka taste in recreated recipes. She showed mouthwatering photos of Hakka classics like pork belly with pickled vegetables 梅菜扣肉, stuffed tofu 酿豆腐, and salt-baked chicken 鹽焗雞, but also highlighted regional adaptations like spiced goat stew in Jamaica, and braised fish in black bean sauce in Peru.

The contrast between traditional Hakka foods in China and adapted diasporic dishes, naturally led Kwan to pose the evening’s first question: “What is authentic?”

He shared that his gut answer is that what is authentic is what you had as a kid or rather, what your grandmother fed you. But, he says, Chinese American chop suey is also authentic if you grew up Chinese American and that’s what you had. He told the audience about a recent craving for a Japanese eel rice bowl that gave his answer more nuance. Something tasted off. He realized the rice was Chinese rice, not Japanese rice. The waitress explained that Chinese rice was simply cheaper. “Ah well,” he said, “now that’s not authentic.”

But when food evolves through diaspora, time, and global influence, when does authenticity begin or end? The panelists debated: is a Chinese restaurant more or less authentic depending on how many white customers it serves or not? How do you reconcile the fact that mayonnaise appears in the popular Chinese walnut shrimp, even though it isn’t a traditional Chinese ingredient? Or that mapo tofu wouldn’t exist without chili from South America? Or that the Cantonese egg tart is actually an evolution of the Portuguese egg tart?

“I think it changes constantly — authentic or not authentic,” says Anusasananan.

She went on to explain how she captured the Hakka recipes for her book, which was simply asking Hakka people around the world to tell her what their Hakka food was, so she can share it with others who want to make them at home.

“Chefs are notorious for giving you crumby recipes,” Anusasananan remarked. She explains it’s because chefs are working with large quantities, so they have a hard time adapting it for the home chef.

Instead, she tells us that the best way to capture family recipes is to take a video, taste along the way, and observe the consistency of sauces.

“So, spending time with your parents,” Chong reflects. The audience laughed, because everyone knew it was true.

Kwan traveled everywhere for his Chinese Restaurant project, which he describes as a documentary series exploring diverse Chinese restaurants in far reaches of the world, now repackaged as his book, Have You Eaten Yet? decades later.

He tells the audience that out of all his travels, Madagascar was the most surprising. There are now five generations of French-speaking Chinese Madagascans, many of whom later moved to Montreal or Paris. He was amazed at how keen the Chinese Madagascans were in preserving their culture. Even children who were one-eighth Chinese attended Chinese school and wrote perfect Chinese. They eat soup chinois, a wonton soup that has become a national dish of Madagascar, morning, midday, and night.

While in Peru, chifa is the name for Chinese food, derived from the Cantonese phrase sik faan 食飯, meaning “to eat rice” or “time to eat”. Chinese immigrants introduced rice cultivation techniques to Peru, helping integrate rice into Peruvian cuisine alongside the traditional staple, the potato.

But what does Chinese food look like today? Kwan notes that there are now many fusion restaurants compared to the past, and there’s a slow metamorphosis in what Chinese food means. Young people are showing renewed interest in restaurant work, partly because food is now part of internet influencer culture and running a restaurant is no longer seen as a low-class profession.

Anusasananan emphasized that travel and exposure bring influences into Chinese diasporic dishes. “Chinese are very smart business people, so they tailor their food to the taste of their customers,” she said. 

She explains that what is often called “Hakka food” outside China, Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan is actually Hakka Indian food. It’s fusion food where Chinese cooking techniques are merged with Indian spices, which became very popular, largely among Indian customers.

In North America, Anusasananan recalls that much of Hakka food has long been labeled as Chinese or Cantonese food, because previously no one knew what Hakka meant. It’s easier for restaurants to say they offer Chinese food and throw in some Hakka dishes. “A lot of it is about good business to survive.”

As the evening neared its end, an audience member posed a question. He recalled that his family told him that, in the hierarchy of Chinese, the Hakka were at the bottom, so they never revealed their Hakka identity in the public to avoid discrimination. At home, however, they practiced their Hakkaness, and his dad made all the hearty traditional dishes, fatty and salty, because Hakka people historically needed them for hard fieldwork in the mountains. Now, though, it seems cholesterol could be an issue, so he wondered out loud: Is there a healthier version?

Anusasananan replied, “But not all the dishes are like that.”

“Well, the ones that taste the best are!” the audience member argued back.

The audience roared in laughter and left with minds full and mouths watering, imagining how Hakka and Chinese food, like the dandelion, will continue to adapt and evolve as diasporas journey through space and time.

The streets were blocked off to make way for the swathes of celebrities and their fans waiting to see them. September in Toronto marks the season of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), ongoing from the 5th to the 15th. On day two, I was delighted to take my seat at the Scotiabank Theatre to see On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, the sophomore feature film by director Rungano Nyoni. An A24 production, the film premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, winning the Un Certain Regard category for best director. Nyoni’s work has also won a BAFTA in 2018 for Outstanding Debut (I Am Not a Witch). After reviewing Sira at TIFF in 2023, I was more than excited to see what this year’s keen selection of Nataleah Hunter-Young, TIFF’s International Programmer for Africa and Arab West Asia, would bring to my eyes. 

The film opens with big, jazzy bass notes, female voices, and a car riding in the dark on a desolate street. Here we are introduced to Shula, the film’s protagonist. She is alone in the car when she sees on the side of the street a body – the dead body of her uncle, Fred. Shula has no reaction. She creeps the car to a stop and calls her father. On the other end, Shula’s dad needs help with the rent, and eventually the topic of Uncle Fred’s dead body is discussed. Again, there is no catharsis, no big emotions, barely even a pause to process the information. The conversation is very “business as usual” as Shula’s father instructs her to stay in the car and promises that he is coming. 

Her father never comes. Instead, we are met by Shula’s cousin, Nsansa, a woman who appears to be drunk, walking alone on the road at night, enjoying the loud music from the speaker she carries. Shula is not warm to Nsansa, barely acknowledging her presence, ignoring her completely until Nsansa hands her a phone through the car window with the police on the other end. It is Nsansa who realizes that Uncle Fred’s dead body is only a few yards away from a brothel. 

When we first meet Shula, she is adorned in the iconic and immediately recognizable costume Missy Elliott wore in to 1997 Supa Dupa Fly (I Can’t Stand the Rain) music video. She has the out-of-this-world sunglasses attached to the sparkly headpiece and the oversized black jumpsuit. She is wearing dark lipstick, a nod to the ‘90s and a look that Black girls pull off the best. These first few moments of the film, with Shula by herself, listening to her radio, wearing clothing that expresses her taste and interiority, are the only glimpses we see into Shula’s backstory. Once the call is made to her father, Shula becomes a daughter, a niece, a cousin, and a young woman in a society that overbearingly dictates her every move, particularly the expectations of her during the mourning period and funeral preparations. Now, the only way we see Shula express herself is in her disdain for her cousin, Nsansa the drunkard. 

Throughout the film, we meet a cast of Shula’s aunties, mother, and other cousins. The women have big personalities and strong opinions about decorum. All gathered in one house, it is revealed to the audience and Shula that Uncle Fred had a wife, a woman who is now widowed. Some aunties decide not to feed the in-laws, while Shula does the cooking to bring to the widow. The kindness is denied and the food never gets to the widow’s family. 

It becomes clear that grieving is not linear, not equal, not shared. Fred’s sisters believe that they have lost something, while his wife, the mother of his children, has lost nothing, that she is a bad woman, a bad wife, and she is the reason Fred is dead. They treat her and the other women in her family like lepers, punishing them with chastisement and increasing ostracism. At one point, the in-laws are found sleeping outside, in an empty pool in the yard, far away from the other mourners. It is Shula who notices and begins to find out more about this woman.

Audiences learn that Fred has seven children at home, with a grandmother also living in the house. The grandmother pleads with Shula not to evict them. Still, Shula is emotionless, inviting the grandmother to come up off her knees. Shula realizes that the widow must have been 11 or 12 years old when she started having Fred’s kids. It is in this contemporary African narrative style that family secrets unravel. Already the unreliable narrator, Nsansa drunkenly revealed that one night Uncle Fred attacked her sexually but she was her own hero and fought him off. She later confesses that that was a lie: she didn’t fight him off. She was molested. At the university to pick up Bupe – another female cousin – to help with the cooking, she made a video revealing that for years, Uncle Fred had been molesting her. Bupe’s mother tells Shula to explain that Bupe has malaria and that is why she is in hospital. We remember the flashback of a young Shula over Fred’s dead body and piece together that Shula had also been molested by Fred. We start to understand the emotional flatness of Shula, her autopilot approach to grieving and her muted acquiescence of what is expected of her from this family. It is in these moments between cousins, in the pantry looking for ingredients, in the hospital, at the university, away from the others, that we see Shula start to warm up to Nsansa, give space to Bupe, and form their own community of grief.  

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a complex depiction of layered pain, the festering wounds that crystallize into silent resentment. It is a film that twists death into the kind of transformation that comes from shedding automatic roles of diplomacy and giving birth to new ways of expression. The aunties find the cousins in the pantry, an intimate moment of bonding, and saying without saying that they know their nieces are in pain, that they are loved, that they know. They sing, there is crying, and the scene is almost baptismal. Water was a recurring theme throughout the film, or spaces of water where there was none, such as the family sleeping in the empty pool. This symbolism calls my attention to the water that is not there, the tears that had not been shed, the saliva from shouting so loudly about their experiences that had been swallowed for years and decades. At times gut wrenching to see all of the pain bubbling at the surface ready to explode, balanced with other moments of music, mischief, and the delights of a sardonic sense of humor. Nsansa gave Shula permission to laugh at these events. And that levity gave audiences permission to also not mourn Uncle Fred or care much about who he was or how he died. The story was about the girls, their healing, and finding voice in the voids. 

In a recurring memory, young Shula remembers the children’s program she used to watch. The narrator explains that guinea fowls chat: “when they see a predator approaching, they start clucking as if to say ‘watch out’. Guinea fowls are useful to all creatures on the Savannah.” At first, I think of the aunties, always moving as a unit, always directing instructions, always clucking their orders, and on occasion, singing in harmony. But it is the closing scene that makes everything clear. While the widow is being accused of witchcraft and the men are deciding the price for Fred’s death, through the window we see a child on Shula’s hip, followed by Fred’s six other children, cousin Bupe, and grandmother, all walking towards the house. At first inaudible, soon we hear the strained vocal cords of Shula, as if being used for the first time. She squawks, an unpleasant screech that forces her to take deep breaths. She is moving towards the chaos, with Fred’s forgotten family, alerting those inside that, even in death, Fred is a marauder. In this act of becoming a guinea fowl, Shula is not only levying a confession that Fred was a pedophile, but also issuing a warning that silence is dangerous. She is calling attention to the family secrets while also breaking the customs of how things have always been. The screen goes black as audiences are left sensing the potential for change, and digesting how much damage had already been done. 

While some flock to TIFF for their spot to see the stars on the orange carpet, it is films such as On Becoming a Guinea Fowl that capture my attention. These are the moments of important storytelling, a world stage to laugh, cry, and feel fulsomely the power of human stories. I am drawn to Nyoni’s distinct way of delivering punchlines that make trauma both recognizable and universal. I was not left feeling raw with emotion. Instead, the ubiquity of these experiences, the pointed truth-telling that families like these existing everyplace, left humming in me a sense of recognition for these characters. We have all met them, again and again, but Nyoni’s directing gives us opportunity to get to know them, to twist them, to move them, to scratch at the cracks. And it is done in a way that feels fresh, healing, and like the film was an experience of flipping through our own family trees, a group therapy session where we all understand the subtext that is felt and not spoken. The film felt like the deep breath one takes after telling the whole truth and then deflating, waiting expectantly.