Speak softly and defy expectations

Rohan P. Kanawade's 'Sabar Bonda', a winner at Sundance 2025, is a tender queer love story

- Uday Bhatia

It speaks to the relaxed control of Sabar Bonda how animals freely roam the frame and steal our attention. An optimistic goat breaks away from the herd and approaches two humans eating their lunch; it's shooed away unceremoniously. A cat draws our gaze as it walks across the screen before it's spooked by yelling and runs off. As Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) talks to his friend Balya (Suraaj Suman), he glances at a nearby buffalo that's lifted its tail and done its business.

Rohan Parashuram Kanawade's Marathi film, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this month, is set in a village in Maharashtra. It's close enough to Mumbai that Anand can take a bus there to perform his father's last rites in his ancestral village. But it's also a world removed, a place, in the local imagination at least, of opportunity and permissiveness, herbal shampoos and special friends.

The phrase khaas mitr, special friend, is said a few times during the film. It's the closest Anand's relatives and friends in the village come to articulating the fact that he's gay. His cousin's wife says it with curiosity. When Balya, a closeted gay man, does, it's with wistfulness. It's a matter of limited vocabulary and propriety, but there's also a tenderness to its usage.