Sabar Bonda, the first-ever Marathi film at Sundance, doesn’t bury its gays

In a ManthanAs a solution, Kanawade’s gay friends, both in India and abroad, pooled their resources to make the film. The parallels between Anand’s character in Sabar BondaKanawade’s queer journey and my own life are numerous. “My father never finished his studies and my mother never saw the inside of a school, but when I came out to them, they accepted me immediately,” says the filmmaker based in Mumbai, who grew up in a slum by a driver father and a stay-at-home mother. . “Some of my wealthy friends, whose parents are very educated, have never been accepted. We always see the struggle for parental acceptance in films, which is true for many, but this aspect of the story is also a reality, and I wanted to show it through Anand’s character.

In Sabar Bondawhen Anand and his mother are faced with endless complaints from relatives that his father always wanted him to marry (obviously, a woman), they share a moment of reflection. Anand’s mother remembers the time he came out to them: “Your father thought I wouldn’t understand, so he always explained things. But I always knew it.

I always knew. A heavy sentence. That’s what my mother told me too. For a queer person, this can be a miraculous affirmation. It was definitely for me. It made me realize that my existence didn’t have to be a footnote.

In India, where concepts of privacy and personal space are often foreign, queer children grow up in a culture of minimization. Want to wear your mother’s bangles and bindi? In the absence of drag balls and queer parties, these might be your only tools for self-expression. But do it when everyone at home is asleep, lest you be humiliated and ostracized. Do you have an opinion or an innocent question during a history lesson? Keep it to yourself; something in your soft tone will expose your quirk to the class bully.

In Sabar BondaAnand and Balya refuse to minimize themselves. They reject pressures to marry women, staunchly resist a world that seeks to mold them into malleable heteronormative figures, and instead take goats to pasture, hold hands, and, most radically, talk.

For Kanawade, this depiction of connection, which contrasts with the transactional nature of Grindr, was deliberate. Balya recognizes the preciousness of this quietly human act: “The boys here don’t sit and talk like you,” he says to Anand, his voice almost a whisper. “They do it and leave.”