There are small gestures, quiet and everyday exchanges. Dramatic announcements do not find a place in his cinema — only radical silences. Defiance is not loud; it is pronounced through pauses. Rural Maharashtra’s enigmatic landscape becomes an intense setting where distress, tenderness and desire synchronise to make way for ‘truths’ marked by the complexities of our times.
Filmmaker Rohan Kanawade, whose Marathi film ‘Sabar Bonda’ (‘Cactus Pears’), winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival 2025, has been selected for the FIPRESCI-India Grand Prix Top 10 Indian Films of 2025, is not concerned with “coming out” narratives. Instead, he invents spaces where existence can breathe. Precisely why it would be unfair to casually reduce him to a ‘queer filmmaker’. Even in his short film ‘U for Usha’ (2019), which depicts a single mother and a farm labourer in rural India drawn to a female teacher, attraction becomes an important catalyst for the protagonist’s desire to learn to read and write. With Kanawade, it is always about something more…
‘Cactus Pears’ unfolds over the 10-day mourning period following the death of protagonist Anand’s father. Anand, who lives in Mumbai, returns to his ancestral village in Maharashtra to participate in the rituals. Gradually, his voyage through grief transforms into a tale of yearning, recollection and self-recognition as he reconnects with his childhood friend Balya, a local farmer who, like Anand, is resisting pressure to marry.
The mourning rituals compel him to confront not only the loss of his father, but also questions of belonging and identity. Everything is accentuated by the brilliant sound design and cinematography, which function almost as major characters in the film, driving it towards brilliance.
With his cinema defined by pauses rather than dialogue, quiet glances and a peculiar restraint, the director — raised by a chauffeur father and growing up in a slum — remembers that as a child he was not interested in storytelling, acting or actors, but in the projector and surround sound system: the technical aspects of cinema. It was during his final year of school that writing began to fascinate him.
“But then I ended up studying interior design,” he smiles. Perhaps that explains his meticulous attention to the way spaces within his frames deepen the emotional resonance of human interactions.
Filmmaker Rohan Kanawade
Talk to him about the fact that the film, conceived after he visited his father’s village following the latter’s death, ends with hope rather than tragedy, and he stresses that although he knew from the beginning it was a story about grief, he was never interested in making a tragic film. “Many mentors asked me to do otherwise, but I was clear — the film had to be compassionate, warm and hopeful.”
No wonder his cinema resists tragedy as the predictable queer narrative and instead offers a warm emotional refuge, where grief opens up a space for desire without falling into the trap of metropolitan yearnings. With static camera work and predominantly wide shots that emphasise where the characters are situated, Kanawade, who took five years to make ‘Cactus Pears’, may not have attended film school, but he firmly believes in the value of collecting random observations from strangers that can help shape an idea. “Something reaches your ears, and it stays in the body. The thought might be completely unrelated to what you already have in mind for the story, but it lends a new dimension, another layer,” he says.
As the conversation veers towards the much-hyped resurgence of Marathi cinema, the director completely dismisses the idea. “Despite winning at Sundance, no Marathi distributor came forward. It took Rana Daggubati from Hyderabad to step in and distribute it.” He continues, “Let’s be clear — not every film can be ‘Sairat’, nor does every filmmaker want to make that kind of film. By the way, it was only the English and Hindi media that covered the film after Sundance. So many people from my own state came up to me and said that my second film should not be in Marathi. What can be sadder than that?”
Stressing that he always wanted a theatrical release for ‘Cactus Pears’ and never considered it an OTT film, Kanawade asks why we have come to believe that only films like ‘Kantara’ deserve to be watched in theatres while the rest can be consumed at home. “In a film like ours, we have crafted an experience through sound and visuals that you simply cannot get on a laptop, mobile phone or even television. Only in a theatre can you truly experience the scale of the images and the surround sound that we have carefully designed.”
Even as OTT platforms in India increasingly follow algorithms, with thrillers ruling the roost, the director observes, “Every web series starts the same way. The colour palettes are the same, the camera work is the same, the background music is the same. They are not really creating meaningful work. The only motive is to hook the audience.”
Believing that India needs more intimate film festivals along the lines of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF), which is about films rather than marketing, he adds, “These festivals are important not just for filmmakers but also for audiences, who must know that another kind of cinema exists.”
Kanawade, whose next film is still “in the head”, believes that conditions are only becoming more difficult for independent filmmakers, especially in the absence of state funding and subsidies that many European filmmakers receive.
“Even the NFDC is no longer providing funds. The government needs to step forward and at least create arrangements with theatres so that independent films can be released.”
— The writer is a freelancer