Rohan Parashuram Kanawade: I wanted to normalise queerness
After a good show last year, the film festival calendar has opened well for India again in 2025 with Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) having had its world premiere on January 26 in the World Cinema Dramatic section of the Sundance Film Festival. The first Marathi language film to get showcased in Sundance, will Sabar Bonda follow the success of Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls last year?
The film is a gentle, tender exploration of a friendship forged in the middle of distress. Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), along with his mother (Jayshri Jagtap), is compelled to spend a 10-day mourning period for his late father in their ancestral village, where he is unable to relate to people at large, more so because of their intrusive queries about his marriage plans. He finds a kindred spirit in childhood friend Balya (Suraaj Suman), who is battling similar marital expectations in the community. Kanawade’s debut feature is a semi-autobiographical story and a rare cinematic exploration of queerness in rural India and among the underprivileged.
Cinema Express spoke to Kanawade two days before he was to take off for the festival with 14 members of the team, including the three main actors. He spoke about his passion for cinema, his journey into filmmaking, and the mix of the personal and the fictional elements in Sabar Bonda. Excerpts:
Let’s start with the title, Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears). What made you pick it up? Was it part of your childhood memories or a metaphor for the prickly sweetness of life?
It’s exactly what you have said. We would go to my maternal uncle’s village during summer holidays, and there used to be a lot of cacti next to his house. My mother would talk a lot about this winter fruit. But I never got to see it. I imagined it. As a child I didn’t have Google to search for what it looked like. I searched for it and got to know what it looked like when I started writing the film. Also, there’s this resilience to cactus. It grows in a rugged environment. The fruit might be thorny from the outside but is very sweet inside. It’s very nutritious. I wanted to use that in the film. My two protagonists—Anand and Balya—are going through a difficult time in their lives. Everyone is pressuring them. Anand has lost his father. But, even in this time of duress, they stay true to their identity. They manage to find cherished moments, moments of sweetness. I also wanted to use a local name for the title. I wanted a Marathi title for the film despite using English names in the labs that the film went through.
Tell us a bit about your background. You are a Mumbai boy?
I grew up in Andheri West, in Amboli. My mom lives there. It's just a one-room house.
So how did cinema make an entrance there? And in your mind, heart, and consciousness?
For me, cinema started with gadgets. My dad never got to see films in the cinema when he was a kid. He saw films during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival, when they would screen them on the road. He started going to the cinema only when he started working as a driver. My mom used to tell me that when she was expecting me, my dad took her to watch [Raj Kapoor’s] Ram Teri Ganga Maili. He would always take us—my mom, sister, and I—to the cinema. I think I was about four years old when I asked him if the cinema was a big TV. He said, No, it’s a screen, and then he explained the projector to me. I was so fascinated by it, a gadget that made everything look so big. I wanted to buy it to watch movies at home and then realised it’s not possible. So, the projector was my first love. I made my first slide projector in sixth standard. I used to go to the theatre just to go into the projection room.
When I saw Jurassic Park, I fell in love with the sound. I started noticing how the sound is used in different films.
I started writing short stories when I was in tenth standard. I studied in Marathi medium, and one of the chapters in our book was taken from a novel. It was so cinematic that I could completely visualise whatever was going on [on the pages]. I was seeing and hearing a film. So, I started writing. I used to write all the horror stories that I had heard as a child.
But I ended up doing interior designing because I was good with drawing. A friend pushed me to make a short film for a competition, saying that I had so many short stories of my own. I started making my first film on a mobile camera in 2007. We couldn't finish it because no one had the technical expertise. We were just exploring. But that process was so interesting that I felt like making one more, and I wanted to finish that one. So, I made another film using my friend's mobile phone, and I used my parents in that film.
Were they in Marathi?
The early shorts were silent because we didn't have the technology. We used those dialogue slates in between the shots like it used to happen in the silent films. Later, when some more friends joined me who knew much more about editing, etc., that's when things started changing. I even bought a Sony Handycam on EMI to upgrade the visuals.
How did the family react?
It was my father who supported me. He told me that if I was spending more time exploring filmmaking, I should switch careers but that I should do it passionately. It was brave of him to say that because he started off as a driver but wanted to work for himself, so from his savings, he started a company making small electric parts. It ran for a few years, but then he had to shut it down because of some losses. He went into depression because he couldn't go back to driving after having worked for himself. But he had to do that because of the family he had to raise and feed. Despite that experience, he still supported me. He was the first person to really push me. In a way I think that it was he who supported me when I was writing the film even though he was absent. He passed away in 2016.
There is a mention of Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat in your film. Did any films and filmmakers influence you overwhelmingly when you were discovering cinema?
Before I got my first laptop, all the films that I saw were mostly Bollywood and Hollywood. Only when I got my laptop did I start exploring world cinema, and friends started sharing films with me. I loved Michael Haneke's Amour. But then I have favourite films rather than favourite directors. Many films from Hirokazu Koreeda and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. I constantly go back to Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Clouds of May.
Having seen the film and spoken to you, Sabar Bonda feels like a tribute to your father. For the first films, filmmakers anyhow turn to their own lives. How much of yours is personal and how much of it is fictionalised?
The basic idea of the mourning period and what I was feeling back then is personal. There were some interactions with my father, like the conversation when I had come out to him in 2013 and he told me that I knew the best about myself. I have lifted those conversations from my life. But almost ninety percent of the film is fiction. It’s imagined, reimagined. Like there was no Balya. I just imagined what if I had a friend in the village at that time with whom I could just sneak out and talk and who could help me stay away from the people and all the pressures. I also took a lot from my memories because I’ve been going to my village; all our relatives stay there. Only my family lives in Mumbai. I shot the film in my maternal uncle's village where my mom grew up. It’s a place called Kharshinde [in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra].
The film doesn’t get cynical. There is a sense of hope and positivity in the midst of loss. The parental bond is beautifully captured. There is the comfort of community despite people also being intrusive…
One of the things I wanted to portray in the film is the acceptance that I got easily from my parents. I was lucky that they loved me so much that for them, accepting my sexuality was not a big problem. Most of the time we only see struggle in queer films. That is true for many people. But I felt that we needed to see the other side also. There are some positive stories. It was very important for me to use my relationship with my parents because it gives hope to people and hopefully many other parents to accept their kids so that the journey can get a little easier for them. I wanted to normalise queerness. An illiterate woman is accepting her child without any questions. It’s just love. There’s nothing intellectual about it. She didn't have to think about it twice. She just wants happiness for the child. It was just that basic, and that's what I wanted to show. These things are not so complicated; we just make them complicated sometimes. I wanted to show that simplicity.
Then there are certain things, like my mother and I don't talk a lot. We are the quiet ones, but my partner has a very different relationship with his mother. So the way Anand keeps his head in his mother's lap, I never did that myself, but my partner always used to do that. So, many things that I could never do in my life I wanted to do in the film.
You’ve very bravely tried breaking stereotypes. We assume urban, educated people to be progressive, but it may not necessarily be so…
I’m happy that you see that. Also, I've been going to my village, and I used to wonder if there were queer people there. Many of my friends have wondered. When you situate the story in a rural area, you also solidify this thought that sexual identity and orientation are natural and are not about the place or economic strata. That’s why I used my own economic background. Many queer people are from the underprivileged classes and castes, and I hope they will see themselves in the film.
Coming to the visual rhythm of the film and the soundscape, I like how you move between tight closeups and long shots and your use of situational sounds...
I wanted to create a portrait of that time [of bereavement] that I had experienced. Most of the time I was just sitting in one place with my mom, and we'd just be observing things. There’d be people coming and going, talking, eating, telling us to do this or that. The house was big, and there were always people all around me. I was hearing voices from here and there. I wanted to recreate that. I wanted the audience to also feel what I had. That even they feel that they are surrounded by these people.
In the mourning period, when you have lost someone, time seems to slow down because of the sudden void. I wanted that slowness in the film. I wanted the wide shots to show the space, the houses, and the outdoors because I wanted my character to be seen in the real world all the time. I only wanted to go close when the protagonists are together. I just wanted to see these people in the real world interacting with nature and with each other and with people.
It's how I saw and experienced things when I was mourning my father in the village and how I heard the world during that time.
Tell me a bit about the casting process. Did you use local people along with the actors?
All the main actors are professional actors. The two lead actors are trained actors who have been doing theatre, but this is their first feature film. I wanted actors from the same region because, for me, the language and the look and the body language were very important. Bhushaan, who plays Anand, is from Ahmednagar, but he grew up in Surat, which was a good thing because Anand is also someone who grew up in the city. His body language and how he speaks Marathi are different from Balya's. Suraaj, who plays him, grew up just fifteen minutes away from where we shot the film. Another amazing thing is that these two guys are actually friends. I found Suraaj through Bhushaan. They studied acting together, and even now, sometimes they work together in plays, and they even write their own plays. They have this long friendship of working together, which really helped us to create this beautiful intimacy between the two men, Anand and Balya. For the relatives, I was thinking of going for nonprofessional actors, but then the number of days I was getting to shoot this film wouldn’t have been enough. I thought I would rather go for local theatre actors. Jayshri, the actor who plays the mother, has been doing a lot of Marathi TV. She has done some feature films, but she played very small roles in them. This is her first big role.
When did you shoot the film?
We started at the end of November 2023, and we finished it in January 2024.
Most of the good, young, independent Indian cinema these days goes through a lot of labs, as has your film. How does the process contribute to the film?
Everything starts with where you want to take your work, and for me it was always important to take it to the biggest platform possible. I never started off as a filmmaker. I studied interior design. I never studied filmmaking. So, it was important for me to get mentorship on my first feature to hone my craft. The international platforms also gave us the confidence that we are on the right track. Another thing I wanted to know was how the film was translating for the international audience. It was important for me that the film be accessible for them. It is specific to a culture, but I wanted them to understand what was going on in the mourning period. I wanted it to be a universal film that everyone in the world can watch. It was important to know how the different international mentors saw it. I didn't change all the things they told me to because I felt that was what my film was about, but filtering their feedback was important to know what I wanted and how they were seeing it. It also helped us to get in touch with some of the producers internationally and get the collaborators who really made this film happen. The international labs and platforms were important for the kind of journey I wanted for this film.
With your film at Sundance, things have begun very auspiciously this year for Indian, and specifically Marathi, cinema. But the irony is that a lot of internationally celebrated films don’t get the right push at home.
We do really want this film to be seen by everyone, and we are actually working towards that, and thankfully, with the kind of response All We Imagine As Light and Girls Will Be Girls got, we are hopeful that we will also get the chance to come to the audience here, and we'll be looking forward to that.