Rohan Kanawade once dreaded the types of questions he would get when visiting the village where his distant relatives lived in India, constantly needled about marriage and kids when he showed up single. Accepted long before by his immediate family in Mumbai, he knew to explain he was gay to anyone in the conservative community would be unnecessarily upsetting during the limited time he was in town, but after being brought back for his father’s funeral and overwhelmed by the untouched splendor that existed out in the rural areas as he started to think about making films, Kanawade made more frequent visits in the time that followed and it opened up a broader dialogue when he would show up with a crew that included actors they might’ve seen on television to film shorts, leaving no doubt that he had a direction in life.
“Now no one asks me about marriage, but they talk about the films,” Kanawade says. “The only question that they have is ‘When are you shooting your next film? Let us know. We will be there. We will help you on this and that.’”
Kanawade has become the pride of the community ever since his debut feature “Cactus Pears” premiered at Sundance, though he made sure they were its first audience at a screening in Mumbai and buzz has continued to spread locally as it’s become a sensation internationally after winning the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema in Park City. The film shows off the enchanting scenery that first captured Kanawade’s imagination as it follows Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) from the city to the village to honor his father’s memory with a traditional 10-day period of mourning as the writer/director himself had experienced, but another kind of natural beauty takes over as Anand begins to find peace, not only in coming to terms with a great loss, but upon reuniting with Balya (Suraaj Suman), a childhood friend that never left the region and like Anand, he’s gay yet has continued to work unbothered by others as a farmer.
Although Kanawade never was classically trained in filmmaking, he makes striking use of all the cinematic tools available to him as one is put in Anand’s shoes to understand the protective shield he’s put up around himself, with arresting compositions that reflect his isolation even within surroundings packed with others and the canny use of sound design to acknowledge what the character is willing to let in or inadvertently overhear. Knowing how thick a wall Anand has created for himself without Kanawade ever having to articulate it with words, it’s all the more touching to see how it’s pierced by Balya as the two start stealing time away to enjoy the simple pleasures of life in the quiet of nature and the film captivates with the serenity it elicits from tapping into a real sensuality. The film’s light touch belies a powerful hold that it places on audiences and with “Cactus Pears” making its way to U.S. theaters this week starting out in New York with an opening weekend full of special screenings, the director graciously took the time to talk about the personal experience that informed it and how he carefully crafted a drama with such a delicate relationship at its center.
From what I understand, this is rooted in personal experience, but not autobiographical. How did it take shape as a story?
In 2016, my father passed away and I had to go to the village because even though I’m born and raised in Mumbai, only my family is [in the city], but rest of our relatives are there [in the village] so my mom and some of the relatives decided that it’s better if we go there for all the rituals and the funeral. Before [then], for almost 10-12 years, I was avoiding going to the village for the reason that everyone was just talking about my marriage over there and I just didn’t want to be part of that conversation. But this time I had no escape. I had to go and I knew that once I’m there, everyone is going to talk about my marriage. [As soon as I got there] people started discussing, “Oh, he cannot light the fire [for the ceremony] because he’s unmarried” and this and that. And I was like, I am doing this. This is my father. I took care of him. No one else is doing it.” And then I had to follow all the rituals that you see in the film as well because my mom really believes in it. She had also lost her partner, so I just had to do things for her because if I didn’t do any of those things, relatives at the villages will start [saying] “Oh, your son didn’t do this and that.”
I just did all the rituals and whenever people were asking me about my marriage, I was just keeping quiet because I didn’t want to stir the environment because it wasn’t the right moment. I was also unsure if I told them about my sexuality how they would respond to it. If they don’t respond in a right way, I wasn’t sure how they would then treat my mother and she really needed them at that moment, so I had to just be quiet for those 10 days. But while that was happening, I was constantly seeking an escape from that house and one day I just had a thought, “What if I had a friend in this village?” I would have just snuck out with him for a while and stayed away from this house. So I thought there’s a idea for a film and I realized that it’s an interesting idea where this character comes to the village for the grieving and he wants to escape this pressure and he has a childhood friend here whom he used to meet during his summer vacation when he used to come here. Maybe at that time they explored some intimacy as teens and now after so many years that they are meeting again. I also thought that it’s an interesting idea that a film starts with death where this character loses a person from his life but towards the end the other person comes in.
I was also interested to show this city and village [contrast] and the grieving period with all the rituals, and by doing all of these things, I can ground this story in our own soil because people usually say homosexuality is not normal. It has come from West and this and that, and we know that it’s natural. So I thought this premise would give me the chance to show sexuality not only in a lower class strata of the city, but also in the remote areas where there is this character from the village who is completely comfortable with his sexuality. He’s not questioning it or struggling to accept it. Many people even in the cities think, “Oh, there are not many people there or they don’t understand things. It’s not like that. And I could use all of these things to create a portrait of the time that I experienced in the village, but I can change it through this film because there was no friend in the village for me and by adding this friend [in fiction], I can make this journey tender, at least for the central character.
Because you use the geography of the area so well, did the landscape actually give this story shape in your mind?
This village that you see in the film is actually my mother’s village where she she was born and raised, so as a child we used to go to that side to spend our summer vacations. I really loved this village visually because it was it is surrounded by mountains. It’s a harsh land, so this village used to look very different than the others because they were on the flatlands. There were rivers and lots of greenery, but this was so dry and in the summer, it used to get so hot that the grass on the mountains used to turn golden brown. I used to love that visually and even then I used to think that because I was in love with movies since my childhood someone should come here and shoot a film because this village is so different. I had imagined that village in the mountains while writing, and I used many things from my memories.
It seems like there’s sort of a cone of silence around Anand that you portray both with the sound, but also visually in the way that you compose shots around him. What was it like figuring out a way to express that cohesively?
When I was there grieving my father, I was in the house all the time and there were people around me all the time. In this room, that room, I could hear people talking from every direction. And whenever there were no people, it was just me and my mom in the house. I used to listen to the silence of the village and at different times, the village sounded different because in the morning everyone is doing their chores and they want to go to their farm or taking their animals to graze, so there’s lots of sound in the village. But then by by midday, everything becomes completely quiet until the evening when everyone comes back, so I wanted to really show that as well as how when you go into the forest with the goats, how the forest sounds — to show that there is life around Anand.
The technology — Dolby Atmos — gives you this chance to create a 360 degree world [where] you can show the world which is outside this frame as well, because you see the characters go out of the frame and they talk from here and there, and to create this through sound, you don’t have to show everything all the time, but the sounds can help fill in the gaps. By just using the sound of the nature could also lend a tender quality to this film and I knew that this would be exciting for my sound designers as well. This was why I decided that I will not have any background music and I will create this whole world only through sound design and many of the silences that we [heard] during the shoot. I had written some of it already into the script, but my sound designers took that vision andworked on it to really achieve what I really wanted to do and we also went to the village [together] after we edited the film — Anirban [Borthakur, one of the sound designers along with Naren Chandavarkar] decided that suggested that we should go to the village again because he had some ideas in his head after watching the film. He said, “Let’s go to all the locations where you shot the film and we will record sounds at different time of the day at each location because then we can have an actual authentic sound and then we can create our own library. We did that and then Naren and Anirban and my sound mixers created that whole feel of the sound.
That’s remarkable. And you have these fabulous actors and I understand that the casting took like three years. I wanted to ask about Bhushan in particular, Bhushan and Suraj in particular, but just what it was like to find your cast for this.
Yeah, I actually cast someone else for both the characters, but as we started doing the readings, [I thought] “This is not working. They were behaving like those commercial actors who just come on board 15 days before the shoot and start shooting” and I said, “This is not that kind of a film.” I told my casting director we need to find different actors and one of my actor friends had already shared Bhushan’s Instagram and I thought, “He’s nice, but we already cast someone else,” but he was always on my mind. And we called Bhushan and he understood all I really wanted. Bhushan studied theater and he really understood the simplicity that I wanted because I kept saying that we need simplicity not in only in the performances but the production design, costumes, visual language, everywhere. We can’t have something very dramatic. He realized that and I thought the way he did it, “This is perfect.”
Then I [asked] if knew any other actors for the Balya character because [I thought] he must have actor friends and and he said my best friend is from that region [where the film is set] and we studied acting together. He showed me Suraaj [Suman]’s Instagram and I said, “He’s perfect. Can you call him right now? I want to hear his dialect.” And I spoke to Suraaj and his dialect was spot on and I never auditioned Suraaj. I just trusted Bhushan and I cast him and that’s how they both came on board. The rest of the actors like them are all theater actors from that region because I really wanted the look and the body language and I told [my casting director] let’s go to the local theater groups. I didn’t want to work with nonprofessional actors because I didn’t have the time to work with them [in the way that you’d need to] in prep and there were long takes, so we didn’t really have to teach them anything but work on their performances.
Once you put it in the actors’ hands, was there anything that you didn’t expect necessarily, but could embrace either a quality or certain dynamics that changed in your mind?
The simplicity that I wanted to achieve finally I could see when they were doing it, but mostly we didn’t change a lot. I used to read the scenes individually with each actor just to dump my vision into their head of how I was hearing the dialogue and because most of the actors work in the theater or in other films where acting is completely different, I did have to sit with them to tell them, “You cannot express the way you do it in other films because that’s not what I’m looking for” and that was actually really difficult for most of the actors because they kept saying that, “Rohan, we haven’t done this simple acting ever.” But they really worked on it and gave me the kind of performances I wanted and showed they could mold themselves into that other [simpler style of] performance.
Of course, when they started doing this, that’s when I started seeing the actual world when they were in their costume, doing the dialogue. Being in their character, I just started shaping their physical performances and that helped a lot in some instances. When I was looking at actors they were doing certain [things] or sometimes they’d suggest something and if it could be part of that vision, I used to say “Yeah, let’s do it.” Most of it was decided already but during the shoot, the changes that happened were mostly physical.
It was fascinating to learn that you were an interior designer before getting into directing and it seemed that background might’ve had an influence on the compositions in this film where the characters’ relationships to their surroundings say so much about them. Do you feel like you developed an eye there?
As I was saying, even in my childhood, when I used to go to my mother’s village, I used to say that this village is so beautiful and someone should come here and shoot a film. So I was interested in the camera and how to use it although I didn’t have one and I was in love with movies, which had an incredibly beautiful visual language that used to inspire me a lot. I was good at drawing, which is why my father’s boss suggested that I should do interior design, and [I thought] let’s do it. I realized I’m not really interested in this, but my sketching was good and my teachers were so happy with my drawings and even in interior design, you have to imagine the space and I already had that imagination, so interior designing helped me a bit better to understand the perspective of the space and whenever I write my films, I have my locations and I can see my shots.
Before shooting the film, I have the entire visual language on the paper because if you read a scene, a different person can imagine that scene a bit differently, but when you have every shot drawn on the paper, [like] “Okay, the first shot of the film is a close-up of Anand while his eyes are closed and he’s sitting like this” and I’ve drawn it, [others] know everything it already there. This is how close we are going or this wide shot is this wide and Anand is going to look this small and I have already pre-edited the film because I don’t shoot coverage. Every decision, even the edit, is right on the paper, so this helps me pre-visualize the film and it helps everyone in the team to know what visual language it is.
I started discussing film with my editor even from the storyboard [stage], so he gave his input on that and we didn’t shoot any [additional] angles for any sequences from what you see and nothing extra except some scenes that we had to completely remove during the edit. I love to do that because sometimes even on the set you get a new idea, which could be a revision of that visual language [you’ve already established] and you just then adapt that, but that’s a good thing because you already have your base. You are not struggling on the set with how should I now construct the scene? How should I block it? Where should the camera be? I like to do that during the prep and the interior design [background] in some ways does help me to imagine my shots and help me draw things, which helps everyone in the team.
You certainly seem to have found the right calling. What’s it been like finishing your first feature and starting to get it out into the world?
It feels nice that the film got such recognition at Sundance and after that, I’ve been traveling a lot. Independent films really struggle to get a release and so many sales agents were saying “no” to the film because they said it’s a very difficult film to release. And I thought, “Should I make an easy film so that it is easy for you to sell? Or should I make the film that I want to make? And you are not doing your job if you are asking for the filmmaker to do your job.” So it is really difficult in today’s time and I think if Sundance didn’t select us or if we didn’t win the award, I’m not too sure what would have happened.
Only after Sundance, we got a theatrical release not only in India, but now in U.S. and other parts of the world within the same year of its premiere. I also always wanted the film in front of the audience through the cinema and not the OTT that is happening and finally people understand when I was saying, “No, I want to create this experience that you can only experience in the cinema,” and after they went to watch it, they say, “Okay this needed to be seen on the big screen.” That is happening, so I’m really happy about that and I just hope that this will allow me to make my next film the way I want to make it. It’s a nice feeling to make a film and finally get it in front of the audience.
“Cactus Pears” opens on November 21st in New York at the IFC Center, November 28th in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal, Duluth, Minneosta at the Zinema 2 and Hudson, New York at Time and Space Limited, and December 12th in Columbus, Ohio at the Gateway Film Center and Atlanta at the plaza Theatre.