Release for grief

EYE CULTURE

- RANJITA GANESAN

"Are you okay?" A seemingly inadequate question to produce during someone's time of grief. Yet, when Balya, a protagonist in Sabar Bonda, poses it to his bereaved friend Anand away from the earshot of the relatives, who are too consumed by ritual organization to worry about emotional comfort — it serves to put oxygen back in the airless room. A reminder that in painful situations it is not the language of a question that matters so much as the sincerity in its asking.

The response he receives is just as momentous for its naturalness: "I don't know." Anand has lost his father, a parent who accepted his queerness and whose support had nourished him — an answerless sort of hurt. Rohan Kanawade's feature-length debut, about the connection Anand and Balya form over the course of the traditional 10 days of mourning recently won the grand jury prize for world cinema at the Sundance Film Festival.