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...

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