How Director Rohan Kanawade Painted A Queer Marathi Portrait Of Grief & Connection

Grief tethers us to places and memories we thought we’d left behind. And in the process, it is a churning that surprises us with moments of love, connection, and quiet revelations. 'Sabar Bonda' (Cactus Pears), directed by Rohan Parashuram Kanawade, is a film that holds your hand through this journey. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival 2025, it’s not just the first Marathi feature to achieve this honor; it’s also South Asia’s only entry this year in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. But beyond the accolades, what makes Sabar Bonda so special is its tender authenticity. Set in a rural village of Maharashtra, this affectionate story of grief, queerness, and self-discovery reaches across the spectrum of human condition.

Sabar Bonda's premise of based on Rohan's time in his ancestral village after his father's death. While he was grieving, he was also avoiding me uncomfortable questions about his marriage and going trough the motions of rituals that were to last 10 days. As he looked for an escape to step away from the house, he imagined a story different from his reality; as a way to change and rewrite his current experience. Hindu death ceremonies barely leave time and space for us to process the loss of our loved ones. So Rohan's emerging script was his attempt to bring some tenderness and warmth into what can be a really isolated and cold experience. In its development the film became a sweet spot between fact and fiction.

Sabar Bonda has the bones of Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name if it were made from a homegrown lens. It may be set in a dramatically different place and context, but at its core it shares the same delicate affairs of queer love. Rohan's romantic relationships over the years were the reference for the bond between Anand and Balya. He imagined, then, a budding romance in a rural setting where queer men still get married to women. He noticed how it was difficult for farmers to find brides who often went for city boys and goverment workers instead, and how this problem was actually a gift in disguise for them to stay true to their orientation. By placing a queer romance in this environment, Rohan paints a picture of the diverse ways in which sexuality manifests itself in different social structures.

The realism in the film was a cinematic language through which the filmmaker built a delicate and authentic universe of love and connection. This treatment was kept in mind from the beginning which led Rohan to write the script in a way that leaned more on naturalistic sound design and no background score. In the film, when Anand and Balya are sharing a pair of headphones listening to music together, Balya states that he thought people sang and danced when they were in love like in movies, which you can't blame him for since so many of us have witnessed similar representations of romance. But in their story, it felt redundant to the director, since the intimacy they shared had a power of its own that emanated best without any musical aid.

"I feel silences can speak much more and can be impactful. I like to make my films feel like we're watching someone's life. And I think maybe that was one of the reasons the silences are also part of that," Rohan explains.

Actors were another reason why the storytelling hit the mark in the film. The protagonists are trained theatre actors and Sabar Bonda was their debut feature. A lot of supporting roles including the mother were played by actors from Marathi TV and film industry. The grandmother, as Rohan tells us, is a YouTuber who shares rural Marathi recipes on her channel.

The setting lended itself to the naturalism of the film as well. Before shooting, Rohan and his team visited every location and storyboarded the entire film. The village where it was shot is one where his mother grew up. As a kid he would visit this place and would dread the journey during summer vacations which included hiking over a mountain and traversing on foot under a fiery sun. But something about a village in a valley surrounded by hills always pulled Rohan towards its beauty. "Someone should should come and shoot film here," he often thought to himself. Little did he know that he's be the one to do it years later.

His relationship with the development of this film was in the making for a long time and it was wasn't limited to him alone. Being an intermontane village, it had no water source so the people had to create an artificial lake for themselves. Part of the team of labourers in this excavation was Rohan's mother, who was a teenager at the time. Thinking of how his childhood, his native village and his mother were an inseparable part of this story is something that the filmmaker cherishes deeply.

When asked about his favourite directors, Rohan chooses to focus on his favourite films instead. Once Upon a Time In Anatolia, Clouds of May, Amour Funny Games are some of them. To him these stories matter more than the names of the filmmakers because of the singular experience each of them proved to be for him. For Rohan, the language in which a story a story is told is as unique as the story. This is what he learnt from his favourite picks and what led him to build the universe within which Sabar Bonda takes place.

This universe isn't just a village or an occasion of a death ceremony, but a sensibility and a disarming vulnerability that defines what it means to be human. Sabar Bonda, beyond its plot, communicates a larger truth about love, loss and the cradling comfort of connection that colours our lives.

Follow Rohan here.

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