I didn’t want to shy away from showing intimacy between two men: Sabar Bonda director Rohan Kanawade

How does it feel that Sabar Bonda is the first Marathi feature to be screened at the Sundance festival?

When I started working on the script, I didn’t have much hope since the previous feature scripts I had written had not worked out. So, I wanted to write this script for myself as I was enjoying the process. The kind of feedback I started getting for it was surprisingly good. That’s when my producer Neeraj Churi and I started taking it to the script labs. When Sundance selected the movie, we were happy since we had not imagined that it would travel this far.

Sabar Bonda is semi-autobiographical. Tell us about your process of scripting.

The autobiographical elements in the film are related to the protagonist Anand spending the mourning period after the demise of his father in their ancestral village. The rest is fiction. When I was grieving my father’s death in 2016, there were so many people who visited us. Every visitor had one question for me: ‘You are 30. When are you getting married?’. During the 10-day mourning period, I was constantly facing the same question. That’s when I started wondering what if I had a friend here, who knew about me (my sexuality). I would have sneaked out of home with him and stayed away from this pressure for a while. The writing involved re-imagining that period and making it more tender for the central character. I started writing the script in 2020.

Sabar Bonda features Bhushaan Manoj and Suraaj Suman in the lead roles. (Photo credit: Vikas Urs)

How did you zero in on Bhushaan Manoj and Suraaj Suman for the roles of Anand and Balya, respectively.

They studied acting together and they have performed together in several plays. That friendship helped in creating intimacy between their characters. My brief to them was: To keep it simple and don’t show off their acting skills. Both of them identified with the pressure of getting married that their characters go through. They said cis men also face the same pressure. They did not try to show that they are playing gay characters. They kept their characters as normal as possible.

At the heart of the story is a queer relationship. How did you keep it free of any anguish and let the narrative unfold in a matter-of-fact way?

To keep the tone tender was a choice. Even though the film starts with the death of the protagonist’s father, I wanted to make a film that’s tender, warm and quiet.

How do you look at nudity? What was your idea behind those scenes?

We did not want to shy away from showing intimacy between two men. That’s something we don’t get to watch in films where two men can be gentle with each other. We watch them being masculine. I wanted to show that tenderness.

You say that a queer person living in a slum and one living in an urban setup are different. How?

Queer movies in India are mostly about upper class characters, which feel as if they were inspired my western narratives. I believe that we have to tell our real experiences in our own way. I grew up in a one-room kitchen home where my mother still lives. My parents accepted it (my sexuality) without any struggle.

Can you recount the moment when you came out to your parents?

Around 2013, when I was upset about something my father asked me to share with him what’s bothering me. I was scared but my father said ‘the important thing is that you know yourself’. My mother was quite accepting too. My father is semi-literate and my mother is illiterate. But it is the wisdom they inherently had and their love for me that made them accept me, something many rich parents struggle to do.

How do you look at cinema — an art form or a medium of expression?

I was fascinated with cinema because I love gadgets. I love how movies are projected on screen. I watched Jurassic Park (1993) and fell in love with its sound. The technical part interested me a lot. In Class X, there was a chapter which was cinematically written. That’s when I started to write. When an idea interests me and I start seeing some images, moments. I wonder how differently one can present these ideas on screen.