Kaktusfrüchte

After the death of his father, Anand, a call centre employee from Mumbai, spends the traditional ten-day mourning period with his mother in his home village. Instead of being able to process his loss, he has to struggle through a jumble of formalities and rituals – always under pressure not to disappoint the expectations of his extended family. He can only escape the confines of the village with his childhood friend Balya, with whom he finds some peace and tenderness in secret moments. But then the mourning period ends, and Anand must ask himself whether his relationship with Balya has a future.

In CACTUS FRUITS, director Rohan Parashuram Kanawade uses atmospheric, emotionally charged images to recount his own experiences as a queer person in rural India: the loss of his father and the impossibility of grieving when you have to hide parts of your own identity. CACTUS FRUITS is a wistful, quietly optimistic film about the glimmers of hope that guide the way out of the fog of grief. At the Sundance Film Festival – where no film in the Marathi language had ever been shown before – it was named Best Foreign Language Film in 2025.