Cactus Pears

Rohan Parashuram Kanawade came out to his father in 2013 and nothing happened. His father told him he knew himself and that was what mattered, and that was the end of it. Kanawade has said he’d almost never seen that version on screen, where a coming out is usually a door slamming, and his debut is what he built out of the anticlimax. Anand is a call-centre worker who leaves Mumbai for his village in rural Maharashtra after his father dies. Ten days of mourning, a house full of relatives, and every one of them asking when he’s getting married. He doesn’t correct them, because his mother needs those people right now more than he needs the relief. So he starts walking out to the hills with Balya, a farmer he knew as a boy.

There’s no villain here, and that’s the whole achievement. The pressure is just aunties and arithmetic, and it’s heavier for being so ordinary. Vikas Urs shoots the fields in long unhurried takes and Kanawade trusts you to sit in them, which is another way of saying the film is slow and completely earns it. It won the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the first Marathi film ever to play the festival. India makes a lot of films about families. Very few of them let a son be this quietly, unremarkably loved.

Anand, a call-centre worker in Mumbai, returns to his family's village in rural Maharashtra for the ten-day mourning period that follows his father's death. Surrounded by relatives who keep asking when he plans to marry, he reconnects with Balya, a childhood friend now farming there, and the two find room for something neither of them says out loud.