After winning the Grand Jury Prize at last year's Sundance Festival and best film at SXSW London, the Indian queer drama "Cactus Pears" arrives in UK cinemas this June.
Set in a village in the Indian state of Maharashtra, the Marathi-language film follows a closeted man returning to his ancestral home to cremate his recently deceased father. A chance encounter with an old friend compels him to come to terms with his own sexuality amidst his family pressuring him to get married to a woman.
For writer and director Rohan Kanawade, the film stems from a personal space as he first conceptualised the project when his father passed away in 2016. Performing a ten-day grieving ritual at the time, the openly gay filmmaker felt "claustrophobic" when he was surrounded by questions around his marriage.
Kanawade added: "My parents knew about my sexuality, but not the extended family in the village. And that was not the time to come out and stir the environment because you don't know how the relatives will respond to it."
With "Cactus Pears" marking his feature film debut, Kanawade aimed to craft a queer romance that didn't "borrow storytelling from the West".
He recounted that when the script was still in development, a Hungarian film peer asked him why his protagonist chose to be silent and not come out to his family. "I was like, do you really think it's that easy? You know, maybe, you know, it's easy in your country, but that's not how it is in India."
What makes the film even more unique than other Indian films is also an intimate sequence that features the two male leads in the nude. For Kanawade, the priority was to show "intimacy and not just sex."
Arguing that contemporary Indian cinema is riddled with "toxic masculinity", the director insisted on capturing the "tender moment after they have sex where they just lie in each other's arms because, that's what most films don't show, this side of men."