‘Cactus Pears’: Sundance Review

Dir/scr. Rohan Parashuram Kanawade. India/UK/Canada. 2025. 112mins

Following the dying of his father, homosexual city-dweller Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) should return to his western Indian village of Maharashtra to look at the standard 10-day grieving interval and endure the suffocating love of his prolonged household. Besieged by nagging Aunties trying to strong-arm him into marriage, Anand retreats into himself – till a reference to a childhood pal, Balya (Suraaj Suman), now a farm labourer, provides an escape. The function debut of Rohan Parashuram Kanawade, Cactus Pears is a subdued, delicate research of bereavement and the quietly radical act of being queer in a rural, lower-class Indian group.

Mild empathy and richly drawn sense of place

It’s a deeply private movie for Mumbai native Kanawade, who was impressed by the lack of his personal father and his experiences as a homosexual man. The semi-autobiographical components prolong to the placement: the Marathi-language image was shot in his mom’s tiny village of Kharshinde. And it sees Kanawade revisiting themes of queerness in modern rural India that he beforehand explored along with his brief movies Sundar (2016) and U For Usha (2019). Though there’s a diffident dreaminess and languid pacing to Cactus Pears, its mild empathy and richly drawn sense of place might entice specialist consideration, with pageant curiosity a given.

The movie, like its central character, is notable for its quietness. With no overbearing rating clamouring for consideration, we’re free to tune in to the cicadas and the sound of birds, a world away from the cacophonous metropolis to which Amand longs to return. He himself speaks in a murmur, when he speaks in any respect. The bustling, bossy prolonged household barely lets him get a phrase in edgeways, however you sense that the choice of remaining silent fits him simply advantageous – it’s simpler than the choice of getting to elucidate why he stays single, and he resists the suggestion of a wedding to a neighborhood woman.

Time is of the essence, says one officious Auntie. In response to custom, Anand should marry inside one 12 months of main the mourning ritual for his father, or else he should wait for 3 additional years earlier than he makes a match. And, as she factors out, Anand is just not getting any youthful. Anand’s mom who, like his late father, understands the explanations for her son’s reluctance to marry, buys him a while by claiming that he had his coronary heart damaged after being jilted by a lover. What she doesn’t point out is that the lover was a boy whose image Anand nonetheless broods over on his cellphone.

So overwhelmed is Anand by the sophisticated guidelines of mourning (he should go shoeless, eat no rice or milk, take no second serving to of meals, eat solely twice a day … the checklist goes on), that he has no time or area to course of his grief. The extraordinary rekindled bond with Balya, a person who shares extra with Anand than their mutual recollections of climbing mango timber and consuming cactus pears, is a glimpse of freedom for each males. And the fields and the open skies the place Balya works, a large and ethereal distinction to the limiting partitions and guidelines of the mourning ritual, lastly allow Anand the chance to be his true self.