Cactus Pears (2025)

Rohan Parashuram Kanawade | India, UK, Canada | 2025 | 112 min | R21 (Homosexual Theme) In this gentle queer drama, a grieving city dweller reconnects with a childhood friend and navigates traditions in his rural hometown. Thirty-year-old Anand reluctantly returns from Mumbai to his ancestral village to fulfil an obligatory 10-day mourning period upon his father’s death. The many details of these rituals and his well-meaning relatives’ insistence on marriage leave him little room to grieve. A rekindled friendship with childhood friend Balya, now a farmhand, offers Anand respite. As the pair delicately peel back the layers of their shared history like the titular cactus pears, their coy gestures of intimacy give way to bolder expressions of desire. Against the backdrop of Western India’s vast, rugged landscapes, this tenderly observed semi-autobiographical debut feature is a sensitive study of bereavement and the realities of queer lives in rural India.