How Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda Redefines Grief, Family, and Queer Belonging in Marathi Cinema

Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) opens in the sterile waiting room of a Mumbai hospital. Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) sits beside his mother, Suman (Jayshri Jagtap), waiting to take his father’s body back to their small Maharashtrian village of Kharshinde, for the last rites.The next few minutes of the film are filled with reminders of ritual. Neighbours, relatives, acquaintances all queue up to tell Anand what he can and cannot do for the next ten days of mourning: no shoes, no head coverings, no temples, no hair-washing, no visiting anyone’s homes. His mourning is immediately shaped by rules. He has already been informed on how he must perform his grief rather than feel it.Sabar Bonda - the first-ever Indian fiction feature to win the 'World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic' award at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival 2025 - marks a turning point for Marathi cinema. It stretches the language of the industry beyond its usual social dramas, making space for tender, queer love and interiority without resorting to either tragedy or tokenism.Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda is, at its heart, about what lingers in silence: a son’s aching memory of a father who truly understood him, a mother’s quiet code of acceptance, and a love rekindled in the most unexpected of spaces. It is a story about longing, belonging, and the in-between where the rest of life often unfurls. And its many subversions—subtle and measured—make it a quietly radical tale of love and loss worth applause.When Anand and his mother arrive in their ancestral village, grief collides with community. But with family comes the inconvenience of scrutiny. Anand is thirty, and every relative is eager to point out that it is high time he gets married. His queerness—tacitly known but never explicitly acknowledged—becomes a point of tension he tries to deflect.Unlike so many queer protagonists in Indian cinema who encounter hostility at home, Anand is fortunate: his parents accepted him. They protected his truth with a cloak of secrecy. The death of Anand’s father, his first and most tender ally, is thereby destabilising. His mourning is not just for a parent but for a world in which he was wholly seen.In the middle of this ache, Anand reconnects with Balya (Suraaj Suman), his childhood friend and former lover. Balya has also experienced a shrinking of his life while Anand was away. He once lived in a mud house, sold his family’s farm to marry off his sister and build a modest brick home. He too faces the pressure of marriage, though he fights it off with the same resilience as Anand. Their renewed bond unfolds not through sweeping declarations but through smaller gestures that stitch themselves together to form a warm blanket of comfort, familiarity, and love.Balya’s steadying hands on Anand’s thighs during a bumpy bike ride, their tender gazes framed lovingly through Vikas Urs’s lens makes for some of the most intimate shots in the film. One of the most beautiful moments in the film does not even have Balya and Anand in the same frame. Anand asks Balya about the cactus pear trees from his childhood, only to find they’ve long been cut down, just like the twin mango trees. Then one morning, Balya leaves a small surprise: a few cactus pears, carefully de-thorned, waiting for Anand. Anand’s face lights up as he bites into them. It’s a small moment, but it carries with it a reminder that love is an act of remembering; what someone once loved and bringing it back to them.'Metro… In Dino's' Queer Plotline Isn’t Progress, It’s a SetbackThe film’s melancholy is threaded through absences—trees gone, a father gone, time gone, a village transformed—but also through the persistence of memory, love, and possibility.Despite dealing with such a heavy and familiar premise, Kanawade resists the melodramatic tropes that often mark queer love stories on screen. Unlike Kohraa (2020) or Joyland (2022), where secrecy inevitably erupts into catastrophe, Sabar Bonda refuses to punish its protagonists.There is always the sense that Anand and Balya might be found out, that the narrative will tilt towards tragedy. But it doesn’t. Instead, their families tacitly acknowledge what they will not name. They also stand witness to their bond and become as much a part of it as they can without admitting to it.When it is decided that Balya might move to Mumbai with Anand, one relative notes that the two friends can take care of each other and Anand’s mother, Suman. When another snarks that it is temporary, Anand gently insists that it may not be. That single line carries the weight of a declaration. And it is enough.Bhushaan Manoj plays Anand with aching restraint. His grief for his father is palpable. His quiet solidarity with his mother has a kind of softness rarely seen between mothers and sons in Indian cinema. Suraaj Suman’s Balya, unassuming at first, takes over and becomes the other half of the possibility of a happy life.As much of this beautifully crafted film belongs to Anand and Balya, it also belongs to Suman. Jagtap is extraordinary in the role. In her, Kanawade creates a rare portrait of a mother who doesn’t need books or progressive rhetoric to love and accept her son. She may be illiterate, just like Balya, but her smarts come from her perception of the world. She grieves, though her grief is tangled with performance. She wails loudly in public because that is what a widow is expected to do. She has learnt that sometimes performance is the best way to protect the truth, so she does this subterfuge.The film relies on this kind of subterfuge often and it is one of its greatest strengths. Indians have a tendency to discuss, argue and worry about things they are too afraid to speak of directly. Sabar Bonda captures this observational truth with fascinating quietness.'Delhi's Political Landscape Seeped Into Film': All That Breathes' Shaunak SenWhat starts in sterility and sadness concludes in tenderness.Kanawade directs with quiet confidence, his quasi-autobiographical approach shaping the film’s honesty. There is no score; silence becomes its own form of music. You hear the textures of mourning, the rhythm of rituals, the space between glances.The last scene, back in Anand and Suman’s cramped apartment in Mumbai, dismantles both the illusions of Mumbai and the suffocating comfort of the village, as Anand settles in with Balya. Their story is simply a slice-of-life one—tender and unfinished, afforded a regularity that is often elusive to queer couples who hail from the remotest corners of the country.Kanawade’s debut is a poignant, soul-stirring portrait of gentle men who defy manhood as defined by Indian society. And it more than earns its place as the first Marathi film to win big at Sundance.(The author is an independent film, TV and pop culture journalist who has been feeding into the great sucking maw of the internet since 2010. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)

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Sabar Bonda: Sundance Winning Marathi Film is a Quiet, Radical Tale of Love

'Sabar Bonda' makes space for tender, queer love and interiority without resorting to either tragedy or tokenism.

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