Sundance Film Festival 2025: Rohan Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) is the silver lining queer cinema merits

Filmmaker Rohan Parashuram Kanawade (left); a stil lfrom his film Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), which premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2025.

With the death of his father, Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) and his mother return to their ancestral village for a 10-day mourning period. The city-bred Anand returns to the village after a long gap. He’s hesitant but duty-bound. The reason soon raises its ugly head even as Anand grieves his loss. Relatives begin pestering Anand to get married. It has happened before, on repeat. The escape Anand seeks from this familiar claustrophobia leads him into the arms of a man — a childhood friend he’d lost touch with, Balya (Suraaj Suman) — a kind of homecoming and resurrection, like the winged lover from Bhupen Khakhar’s painting Yayati (1987).

This is the premise of Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s debut feature film Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), which premiered at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. The sole Indian feature this year competes for World Cinema Dramatic Competition. Paris-based sales outfit MPM Premium has acquired international rights to the film. And while Marathi short films and documentary have been to Sundance earlier (Counterfeit Kunkoo, Nocturnal Burger, Against the Tide), Sabar Bonda is the first Marathi feature film to premiere at the Sundance festival, which stated that they have “never seen films like these coming out of India so often and were intrigued by the whole treatment of the film and storytelling.”

Marathi independent cinema, primarily short films, has told queer stories, such as Mitraa, Lailaa Manju, Under the Waters, Sunday and My Mother’s Girlfriend. And in, perhaps, the only mainstream commercial Marathi feature: Jabbar Patel’s highly-acclaimed Umbartha (1982), “which has a very tiny bit in it about it”, and which came a year after writer Vijay Tendulkar’s modern Marathi play with a lesbian theme, Mitrachi Goshta (1981). Sabar Bonda is, professedly, the first full-length Marathi feature film on queer characters.

The gentle and tender Sabar Bonda works as a double bill with Ambiecka Pandit’s equally sensitive short Under the Waters, where the two young boys and a sexual transgression leading to one’s sexual discovery could have been the prequel to Anand and Balya’s love story years later in Sabar Bonda. “This bond (Anand and Balya) happened because they knew each other since childhood.”

Cactus Pears is influenced by Kanawade’s own experiences, in which he reimagines a period of his life. Like Pedro Almodóvar’s deeply personal work Pain and Glory (2019), in which Antonio Banderas plays Almodóvar, Cactus Pears blurs the line between art and life by mixing autobiography with fiction to powerful effect.

In 2016, while grieving the loss of his father, during the 10-day period, Kanawade was thinking about making a film about it, which is actually a reimagining of that time. But he wanted to completely change his own experience of mourning his father, by changing the setting and adding a fictional plot: a gay romance. “I always thought that there should be love in this setting. When all these strangers used to come and enquire about when I’ll get married, I used to feel like what if I had a friend over here who knew about me and I could have just sneaked out and stayed away from this pressure. So, I explored that story. The romance between the two childhood friends is completely fictional, only the grieving part is autobiographical. And then, I came across this other fact that in farmers, many don’t find brides for marriage, so many farmers stay unmarried for a very long time. I thought that this is interesting and was curious to explore it in my film. Of course, there are gay men in farm community as well. And the situation actually helps him to stay unmarried. So, here was one character (Balya) who doesn’t have to do anything like Anand has to, to really push [nosey] people away,” says Kanawade, who subverts the dark, scrawny farmer trope in the well-built, light-skinned Balya.

The film also takes place in Mumbai and is majorly shot in his mother’s village Kharshinde, near Shirdi, instead of his father’s, as it happened in real life. Kharshinde was also chosen for its locations. And relatives doubled up cast and crew. “With my every film, I’ve been trying different language. In this film, the whole treatment is different. My short films had tracking shots, background music, it had a completely different tone from this one,” he says.

Cinema came to Rohan Kanawade in childhood — or rather that love started with a gadget. He was fascinated with the film projector and not films per se. The little boy yearned for a film projector, to watch movies at home in a big format, not on the small TV. Kanawade’s dalliance with filmmaking (an unfinished short film) happened in 2007 with a small gadget — a Nokia mobile phone with 1.5-megapixel camera — while he was preparing for a future in interior designing. He could draw well. Sound in cinema piqued his interest since Jurassic Park (1993) and he’d started writing stories in Class X.

It was in childhood, too, that Kanawade realised he was interested in men, though he came out to his father in 2013. “I never felt sad about it [being queer], to be honest. And that is why I wanted to explore that in my film also because I mean for some people it is a struggle to accept themselves, that is also a reality. But my thing is, we always see only that [the struggle], we don’t see this other part which could also be positive. So, that is why I use those parts in the film,” he says, “We want to change queer narratives. But how do we do it? By showing the positive in society, too.”

Bhushaan Manoj (right) and Suraaj Suman in a still from Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), which premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2025. (Photo: Vikas Urs)

More often than not, whenever queer-themed films are made, it’s always about the singular aspect of the character’s queerness, about their struggles, for acceptance in the heteronormative world, about a tragedy, their defeat, or, the more conspicuous negative stereotyping. Isn’t the human buried beneath identity labels also capable of joy?

When Jeo Baby’s Mammootty-starrer Kaathal – The Core (2023) released, it took the Malayalee society by surprise. For the first time, a mainstream megastar had approached a sensitive subject on screen with hitherto unseen sensitivity, even as a certain shame has shadowed the no-longer-young once-have-been lovers, distanced by class, a loveless marriage and social/political repute. It gave visibility to the hushed. It was achingly beautiful but melancholic. Bengali cinema owes itself to the late Rituparno Ghosh, primarily, for bringing tabood topics around queer reality to our dinner-table conversations, consistently, including humanising transgender. The struggle for acceptance, however, was still the axis of rotation. And while Bollywood has done much damage with its disingenuous attempts at representation, but even in the more well-intentioned, better-thought-out films (Badhai Do), the characters eventually have to fit into the heteronormative, feels gay filmmaker Onir who’s been telling different kinds of stories with the queer gaze and rejects the cisgender-heteronormative gaze, advocating for queer narratives to be told by queer people themselves. Like Kanawade.

“I believe that queerness, someone’s sexuality is just a part of their life, that’s not their identity. And that is why in my film also, I didn’t do that,” says Kanawade, “That it is just a part of their life. They are not fighting for their identity or acceptance at all. Because at the end of the day, our goal was to present this to men as just normal human beings, just like any other [heterosexual] man. I can’t talk about other filmmakers, why they want to do what they do, maybe because of their struggle they feel strongly about it. For other people, it must have been a struggle, and so they might be drawing inspiration from their lives, but in my life, I have never questioned my sexuality. That’s why I’m not telling a story through that lens. And that to me is how we can change the story [the queer narrative]. I’m trying to show a different side to queer stories.”

Queer-themed films like Stranger by the Lake (2013; by Alain Guiraudie) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004) inspired Kanawade to push his storytelling in a new direction. These showed him that “one can situate these stories in so many different ways, that one doesn’t have to always talk about the struggle and acceptance.” Kanawade wants to change queer narratives, by telling “some positive stories because how else do you change? Just tell your stories honestly. The goal was never that I wanted to change this or that. It’s just that whatever I was feeling I wanted to show that as honestly as possible. And because of the nature of this film also, I wanted to present the real life,” he says.

Kanawade, who wrote the script in 2020, submitted it to film development labs as a matter of practice, and with the hopes of getting a mentor and professional insights, since he’s not a trained filmmaker. First, the script got into the Production Finance Market, run in association with BFI London Film Festival. Then, it went for developing at the NFDC ScreenWriters Lab for Marathi script, where filmmaker Umesh Kulkarni mentored Kanawade. And then, the project got selected for Venice Biennale College Cinema and Venice Gap-Financing Market and NFDC Co-Production Market. Kanawade had started shooting and doing pre-production of the film when the project was selected for Goes to Cannes segment at the Cannes market (Marche du Film), where they showed 12 minutes of the film. “The script was written but going through these labs were for my own learning and also to give visibility to the film because since I’m a first-time feature filmmaker, these labs help you, push you closer towards making the film. And, mainly, for the visibility. But I knew what kind of film I wanted to make,” says Kanawade.

“Many people keep telling you do this and do that. But only thing that I keep learning, and I think that is really important as an artist, is always listen to your instinct/gut feeling, that will always make all the difference,” the filmmaker adds.

At one of the film development labs, a mentor told Rohan Parashuram Kanawade to make his autofiction film’s protagonist Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) to stand up before the village and make a speech for acceptance. Because, he was told, “this is the power of cinema”. Everyone else was already doing that. Kanawade knew that that’s not the kind of film he wanted to make.

“I know so many [queer] people who never stood up in front of the world or their relatives, but they are still living their life. They are finding their own ways to happiness and navigating through these complexities. I wanted to represent that. We have never seen [in films] two men being so gentle and intimate. This is what I wanted to show,” says Kanawade, “At its core, Sabar Bonda is a romance drama.”

He laughs at the thought of how, in childhood, he used to think that “when you fall in love, you have to sing and dance,” because “that’s what we are seeing in the films, singing and dancing, and I used to get so tensed. But I wanted to create a feeling of someone who is falling in love in real life,” he says. So, silences and diegetic sounds of nature become the background score to the characters’ romance in the film. Romance is always about the subtle nuances not the overtures. And Sabar Bonda feels like a gentle cool breeze on a hot summer day. There is a kind of liberation he experiences when around Balya. Even in their most intimate moments, they are not in a dark room hidden away from the world, but baring themselves in the open, finding their true selves/nature in Mother nature. The director chose to not show two men engaging in a sexual act as is shown in queer content. Instead, one runs his fingers through the hair of the other, massages his forehead. The tingling sensation of awkward anxiety to acceptance one feels when fingers touch. Small, subtle gestures establish the kind of old-world romance that’s vanished from love stories in our films now.

The dialogic silences between what is uttered is music to their ears, it is not melancholic, it is restorative, the unspeakable connects the two in a bond — silence is what they seek from others. And, so, the ambient sounds of nature, of others voices and conversations gets amplified. “With the sound, I wanted to create a portrait of time as I had experienced. My sound designer Anirban Borthakur and I went to all the locations in the village where we shot the film, at different times of the day, and recorded myriad sounds for the ambiences. Sound is coming from all over. You don’t see those other people [but you hear them], I wanted to show that Anand is surrounded by these people, there is life happening around him,” says Kanawade.

When Anand sits down on the floor with everybody to eat food, the camera is looking down on all of them, as if the relatives are looking down at him — for not getting married — and the filmmaker is looking down at these relatives. Vikas Urs’ cinematography isn’t intrusive but rather empathetic. With Urs, Kanawade recreates a verisimilitude of his own reality — both lived and imagined. What’s on screen is 90 per cent of what the filmmaker drew on paper. “Nowadays, you see certain films where the camera is all the time really close to the characters, following them. I didn’t want to do any of that. I wanted to see these people constantly in the world. That’s why there are wide shots,” he says.

The desire to recreate the real-world feel steered Kanawade away from Cinemascope and towards shooting in 1.66:1 (European widescreen) aspect ratio, which offered him a height and width to capture the landscape and mountains as well as go close-up when needed. His brief to his lensman and sound man was “to create a film which is authentic, realistic and simple, not going for technical big things but simplicity.” He took three years to finalise the DOP, Vikas Urs (who’s shot Natesh Hegde’s Kannada films Pedro and Vaghachipani), and two months to discuss the storyboard and technicalities. “Vikas spent time with me in the village, we went to see all the locations, meet relatives, see the light, etc., because I really wanted different scenes [of the film] in different lights. Each day, you see so many different moments of, throughout the day, that I wanted that light to represent the time,” says Kanawade.

This play of light and sound is edited deftly by National Award-winning Anadi Athaley (who’d edited Samarth Mahajan’s Borderlands) to give the film an ease of flow. It takes a village to raise a child. And Sabar Bonda won’t have been realised had it not been for a pack of passionate minds, from India, the US and Canada, to produce this labour of love. Main man Neeraj Churi had also produced Kanawade’s short film, U for Usha (2019). During post-production, colorist-producer Sidharth Meer and musician-producer Naren Chandavarkar boarded this ship and brought along actor and indie producer Jim Sarbh. “Because of the nature of the film, we knew, maybe, we will not get the kind of support we really need. In the beginning, it was actually my queer friends from the community who came together to fund this film. So, with their money, we made the film,” says Kanawade.

While same-sex love was decriminalised in India in 2018, a big win for the community, same-sex marriage is still a far cry. But Kanawade is hopeful. “When you have these kinds of films coming out which are so authentic and telling just human stories and normalising queer stories, I think we can only hope for the best to happen. These films are also the hopeful thing,” he says.