Secret of a Mountain Serpent

Most film-makers use craft to tell stories. But some use stories to craft unfilmable feelings. Nidhi Saxena did it in her feature-length debut, Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman, which had its world premiere at Busan last year. The life of a middle-aged caregiver and her ailing mother in a crumbling ancestral home became a medium to explore the transience of memories, trauma, loneliness and everything in between. The montage of a character recording whispers and past sounds from the walls of her house with a boom mic can seem strange — pretentious, even (the house in ‘arthouse’). But it encouraged us to renegotiate their relationship with the act of watching a movie. The orthodox need to interpret fiction made way for a sensory experience of understanding life itself. Imagine the screen speaking to the viewer in a different language: where expression comes disguised as an aesthetic.