Sabar Bonda review: Rohan Kanawade’s debut reframes queer desire through the ritual of mourning!

Sabar Bonda is India’s Call Me By Your Name that romanticizes rural India not as a postcard summer film, but as a breathing space where the act of letting go becomes a way for reconnection. 

My first brush with a 13-day funeral came when my grandmother passed away in December 2020. It was the first time I had witnessed death so closely within the family, and while I was mature enough to register everything happening before my eyes, I was a novice in how to feel about it. Each day brought a new ritual and with it, a new argument over how it should be carried out. My uncle bore the weight of duties that demanded he eat only certain foods, wear certain clothes. Some relatives insisted that such ritual busywork eased grief, keeping people too occupied to let sorrow breathe. For me, it felt closer to a wedding in reverse where it is the same community gathering, but where joy is permitted, grief hovers with an undertone, almost like a hidden current. Sabar Bondadwells precisely in this uneasy space of what remains unsaid beneath what is spoken to weave it's intimate and tender tale of silence.

Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), a thirty-something call-center employee, returns to his village after his father’s death for the 13-day mourning period. As the new patriarch, he must now fulfill the funeral rites of the man he has lost, a father who was also a friend he shared well kept secrets with. What marks as an end of the line of a beloved parent also becomes a starting point to rekindle what was once lost. As Anand, in the midst of rituals, encounters Balya (SuraajSuman), his childhood neighbor and “special friend” and together they slowly step back into the intimacy once left unfinished. Their reconnection emerges not through grand declarations but through shared dreams, looking into each other's eyes, soul-baring walks tending goats, plunging into the lake’s cold waters, and, eventually, the simple act of holding each other.

In his semi-autobiographical debut, Rohan Kanawade weaves a story where loss becomes a quest to ease loneliness and rediscover true companionship. For Anand, the death of his father is not just the loss of a parent but of the only elder who understood and accepted him as he is - gay. Now, no one remains to support him except his mother, who must silently carry the burden of her son’s secret in a judgmental world. And as the mother-son bond grows stronger, to shield him, she maintains the facade of expected behavior whether it is wailing loudly in front of relatives or fabricating a story for Anand - because his girlfriend broke his heart, he isn’t ready to marry.

Yet Kanawade refuses to frame this quest as a melodramatic tragedy. Instead, he offers a tender portrayal of what it feels like to be queer in a society that not only rejects your identity but insists on rendering you invisible. It's in the way how the extended family and the village is preoccupied only with Anand’s marriage while mourning. As though they sense the urgency to nib in the bud the hidden romance between Anand and Balya but cannot speak of it. Hence their concern is reframed into warnings like it is “high time” he married, lest he end up alone. Here, the unsaid becomes more important than the spoken, and this very undertone shapes the grammar of the film. They are constantly reminded of the consequences in a language of subtext as Anand is told that his feet will burn and Balya is literally chased out of his home.  

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Cinematographer Vikas Urs translates this grammar of silence into form. His camera rarely intrudes, holding still like an unobtrusive observer, allowing glances and gestures to breathe. It lingers without overstatement capturing stolen glances as Anand lovingly gaze as Balya bathes or Balya tenderly caresses his hand through Anand’s hair. Only when intimacy is granted does the camera dare to move closer, as if receiving consent. The stillness becomes an aesthetic of honesty, a refusal to overdramatize what is both ordinary and extraordinary as if love unfolding in the everyday. Kanawade further threads the film with a generational parallel. Anand’s father once chose an uneducated bride because she could cook, valuing care over credentials.

 Anand, in turn, finds his anchor in Balya, an illiterate shepherd and driver. In both cases, love becomes less about convention and more about the sustenance it offers. The film reframes queerness not as an exception of two men falling in love but as continuity of two people, against the odds, choosing each other.

Independent cinema in India often struggles to draw audiences, partly because of distribution barriers, but also because such films are unafraid of the emotions it might stir within us. Sabar Bondadoes this but in an embracing way where it unsettles you while holding you close as silence becomes a vessel through which buried feelings surface. So, by the time Anand and Balya transition from hidden lovers in open fields to companions in a cramped Mumbai apartment, the ache of their comforting rural idyll lingers. Their journey from rooftop cigarettes, eating cactus pears, and field-side naps to a life in a matchbox flat captures both the freedom of the past despite the consequences and the compromises of the present despite the acceptance. The funeral rituals - forbidding to eat rice, milk, wearing slippers or stepping in temples structure the film; Kanawade’s debut becomes not about closure but continuity. In the end, Sabar Bonda becomes that quiet ache of cathartic release that reminds us that to truly feel is also to gently let go.