Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) shall be making history as the first Marathi feature to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival’25. His debut feature, it shall also be South Asia’s only feature film competing at the festival. The film was developed under the Venice Biennale College Cinema ‘23 and NFDC Marathi script camp. But all of that’s news. What’s more important, is to tell you how beautiful his film is. Sabar Bonda is tender and raw, and the kind of film you feel like touching and holding and wrapping around yourself. Flowing ever so gently amid the landscape of rural Maharashtra, it tells a heartwarming tale of love and grief and love amid grief. Anand, a 30-something city-dweller, returns to his village after many years for a 10-day mourning ritual after his father’s death. It is a journey of returning to long-buried memories and discovering love and comfort in unexpected places. Rohan tells his own story in parts, and weaves in some of his imagination alongwith. You don’t come across such an honest film every day.
I had a lovely time chatting with Rohan about his growing-up years, turning into a cinephile, his relationship with his father, the Sabar Bonda journey, and more. It is an incredible journey, and a definite win for Indian independent cinema. Read on.
I’ll start from the very beginning. How did cinema happen to you?
My dad used to take us to the cinema hall to watch movies. When I was four, I asked him, ‘Is it a big TV?’ And he explained to me how the screens and the projectors work – I didn’t understand much, but I was fascinated with the projector and the light coming from that small window behind us. I saw a projector for the first time when, in my school, they showed us this Marathi film called Shyamchi Aayi, and throughout the film, I was not looking at the film, I was looking at that machine. My love for films started with these gadgets. I’m still very into gadgets.
When I saw Jurassic Park, I fell in love with sound. And when I was in the tenth standard, we had this chapter in a Marathi textbook called Smashanatil Sona. I could imagine each scene and action when I read that chapter. It was written so cinematically, inspiring me so much that I started writing short stories.
While working as an interior designer, one of my friends told me about a short film competition. She said, let’s use one of your short stories and make a film. This was 2007, one of my colleagues had a Nokia phone with a 1.5-megapixel camera. We used this camera, all my colleagues acted in it, and I directed it. We couldn’t complete it because every time we tried to edit on Windows MovieMaker, our computer crashed. But after that, I got interested. I wanted to make more films. My dad, mom, and some of my neighbors acted in my second film. I kept borrowing my friends’ mobile phones and making films. That’s when my dad saw that I was spending more time in filmmaking and told me it was okay to switch my career. And him saying that was important, because he had quit his job after working for a few years as a driver, using his savings to start something by himself. That hadn’t worked out, and he had gone into depression. And he was still supporting me to leave my job and do something independently.
I met a few friends who started guiding me. I met my partner, who also started supporting me in my journey. So it was all these people who came into my life and gave me all the support. It is because of them that I could sustain my exploration.
When I started writing Sabar Bonda, it almost felt like my father was supporting me even though he was absent. His absence actually made me write this film because it’s based on that experience.
When I wrote Sabar Bonda, I showed it to my producer, Neeraj Churi – he and I had also made a short film, U for Usha, and had wanted to make a feature together. He loved the script and said, let’s do it. We knew it would not be an easy journey to make this film, but we were ready for it. That’s when I told him that we should start submitting to labs and markets. We did that because, firstly, it’d help the film get visibility. And secondly, I’d get a chance to get some mentorship, which I never really got because I never went to film school.
We started meeting a lot of people, but we still didn’t get the financial support because people were a bit skeptical about the kind of film I wanted to make. The queer community helped me finance this film. Mohammed Khaki from Canada, Kaushik Ray from the UK, and Neer – my producer Neeraj. We shot the film with financial support from these three people. During the post-production, Naren Chandavarkar and Siddharth Meer, who have their post-production facility, saw the film and came on board to bridge the gap so we could finish it.
It truly takes a village to make a film. How did the story of Sabar Bonda come about?
I was in my village, mourning my father, and before that, for almost 10 years, I had avoided going there because people were always talking about my marriage. The discussion had started when I was in the tenth standard – that I would have to get married in the next few years. I didn’t want to get into that conversation. In 2013, I came out to my father. And when I did, it was instant acceptance. When my father passed away, I had no option but to go back to the village for the 10-day ritual. We knew that everyone was going to ask me about marriage.
That’s what happened every day, for ten days. And that’s when I started feeling, what if I had a friend over here who knew about me? I could have just sneaked out and stayed away from everyone for a while. That thought stayed. And that is why I decided to write, work on this idea to change my experience and make it tender for the character in the film.
The first thing that drew me to the film was that he was falling in love amid grief. So Anand was mourning his father and he was falling in love at the same time. And that spoke a lot about the duality of life itself. How did you feel about that?
I don’t know. It was so instinctive because of what I was going through at that time. Because of those emotions, that thought just came to my mind. I had no story, I was just thinking, how can I escape? And there was no escape. Most of the film is fiction because I was exploring the ‘what-if’ thoughts in my head. Only the basic premise of going to the village and grieving is from my life. Everything else is imagined.
Love was a sort of escape for you.
Yeah, yeah. But it was not there at that time (laughs).
Another theme that really struck me was loneliness. And, of course, loneliness is a very important element of the queer experience, especially in a country like India. But the way you depicted human touch, intimacy – the importance of it – I think it was, firstly, very beautifully done. And secondly, without even showing the city, you sort of commented on the loneliness that Anand’s character feels when he’s in Bombay. Was that also a conscious decision?
No, I mean, nothing was conscious. Because it was based on my experiences, I didn’t really have to make any conscious choices. I just had to filter out what I wanted to show. But do tell me, why did you feel that Anand is lonely in the city?
I hope this does not give out too many spoilers, but the first time you show touch – it’s a very long drawn-out scene. The way it was shot – and Anand’s character is also very withdrawn – doesn’t talk much. I felt that he was desiring it for a very long time.
I think, in a way, you are right. But I think he was not alone. Withdrawn is right, because of the situation he’s in, and he’s missing his father. When he finds a connection, he finds comfort and tenderness because he’s like a fish out of water.
His father had once said to him, if you feel sadness, share it with me. I’m there. His merely saying that had made Anand feel better during a heartbreak, because that support had given him so much strength that he had stopped feeling alone. So his loneliness stems from the situation he is in, that his biggest support system is not there anymore.
And I’m happy because you have a different view. You know, everyone interprets a film in the way their own experiences are, the way they look at life.
Absolutely. You shot this in a village. How important is the village’s setting in telling the story of Sabar Bonda?
It was important in a way. I wanted to get it authentic because I’ve been going to my village since my childhood.
And you shot in the same village?
In my mother’s village, where she grew up. I’ve been seeing villages since my childhood. And I have also seen them change – like some of the houses, from mud houses to bungalows. So I’ve seen those changes, and I wanted to get them right.
We also don’t see too many queer stories coming out of rural India.
I don’t know why they don’t, in feature films. If you go to the Kashish Film Festival, you can see many short films which are shot in rural India. But I hope that changes, and we see more feature films too.
I’m also curious to know how the experience was while you were shooting in the village. Did you engage with the people there? I’m sure they must have been interested in what you were shooting and what the story was.
No, we didn’t tell them what exactly the story was. We avoided the sexuality aspect of it.
When I made my short film, U For Usha, even then, we hadn’t told the villagers what the story was. But when we had our first cast and crew screening, we invited the village, and they booked a whole bus, and everyone came to Mumbai. After the film was over, the school teacher raised his hand, came on stage, and said, ‘We had no idea what you guys were shooting. But now we know what it was. And we really loved the film, we’re so happy that you shot the film in our village. We would really like it if other people from the village could get to see this film.’ So at that time, I realized how all of this depends on how you tell that story. I just hope that whenever they get to see Sabar Bonda, they understand what the film is.
Does it matter to you, how your village reacts to the film?
It does matter in a way. I just hope they understand the humanistic part of it. And people in the village do know about queerness. It’s just that they don’t talk about it. They don’t have the words to talk about it.
There is a certain tenderness and softness in the way you’ve shot the film. With the light and the colours too. You said you started writing the film just for yourself. Did you have this vision from the very start, or did the labs change something?
When you’re submitting to the lab, you need to have all your documents ready – everything, from your visual style to your artistic expression. And whenever I’m writing a film, I’m actually writing the images. Because I’ve seen villages since my childhood, everything that you see, the color palette or the grading, or the naturalism of the images, is how I saw it.
Whenever I travel, I click photographs. I had clicked some pictures when I was in the village, mourning my father. Whenever I click a picture, I like to grade it and create a certain mood for the image. When I finalised all the locations, I made my own storyboard. So, for 90% of the film that you see, I had sketched everything, which I had discussed with my DOP in detail. Even not having any background music was part of the script from the beginning. So, most of the soundscape that you hear is also written in the film.
From the films your father took you to watch when you were young, to later when you got more interested in cinema as an art form, I’m sure the kind of films that you were watching were also changing. And when Sabar Bonda happened, were there any specific influences?
We used to watch a lot of Bollywood, Marathi commercial films at that time. Even now, I go and watch some commercial films. But there were certain films I still remember from my childhood. When I was a kid, I saw Jabbar Patel’s Jait Re Jait, which I felt was so different. It looked so different from anything else I had watched. When I started working as an interior designer, I bought my first DVD home theater system, and took membership in a video library called 70mm. I could get two DVDs every day, and they had a section on world cinema. That’s when I saw a lot of world cinema. Later, when I started making queer friends, some of them were cinephiles, and they used to suggest films.
There are some directors I’m interested in and always look out for. The Turkish filmmaker, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, or Clouds of May – I really love those. Some films of Hirokazu Koreeda. Their films feel like novels to me. I love that about their films. There’s Yi Yi, a Taiwanese film that I love. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Michael Haneke. Their films taught me that I should tell each story uniquely. Also, when you have a story, that story itself tells you how it should be told because that’s how you start seeing the image.
Lastly, how does Sundance feel?
Oh, it feels amazing. It feels like a dream come true. And film festivals help. When you’re making independent films, you need this visibility. I hope it helps in the distribution as well. We are excited to see how the Sundance audience reacts to the film and the kind of feedback we get there.
From the ind.igenous desk
