'Cactus Pears' and the case for slow cinema from the Global South

"Cactus Pears," the second feature from Indian director Rohan Parashuram Kanawade, opened the Critics' Week sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival on 16 May 2025 and went on to screen at the Mumbai Film Festival before landing in the autumn festival circuit. In the year since, the film has become a small case study in how patient, regional-language work from the Global South moves through a pipeline that did not exist for the previous generation of Indian independent filmmakers.

The case for slow cinema from the Global South is, in part, a distribution story. The films are increasingly being made. The harder question is whether they can be seen.

A film that earned its festival tour

Kanawade's film, a Marathi-language drama set among sugarcane workers in rural Maharashtra, won the Prix Découverte at the Semaine de la Critique and was acquired shortly after for international distribution. The pattern that followed is now familiar to anyone tracking South Asian independent cinema: a Cannes premiere, a dedicated-sales pickup, festival dates through the autumn, then a long tail of territory-by-territory releases.

What is different about "Cactus Pears" is the tempo of the film itself. Running at a pace that festival programmers call "patient," it draws on the visual grammar of Indian parallel cinema of the 1970s while keeping its feet in the present countryside. Critics noted the influence of filmmakers who worked at the margins of the Hindi commercial industry, but the framing matters less than the fact that a Marathi-language feature about land, caste, and queer intimacy could travel at all.

That this is no longer remarkable is the point. A decade ago, a film like this would have struggled to find a sales agent. Now the infrastructure exists, however imperfectly.

The pipeline problem

The bottleneck for slow cinema from the Global South has rarely been the films themselves. The 2020s have produced a generation of working directors across India, Brazil, the Philippines, Senegal, and Indonesia whose work circulates at Locarno, Rotterdam, and the BFI London Film Festival. The friction sits in the layer between festival premiere and the audience.

Streaming platforms have absorbed a share of this catalogue, but the economics are unfavourable for the slowest work. A two-and-a-half-hour Marathi drama, or a three-hour Tagalog ensemble piece, does not fit a homepage optimised for completion rates. The result is a bifurcation: festival-friendly runtimes and pacing survive on the circuit and on niche arthouse platforms, while the broader streaming audience is steered toward tighter cuts.

This is not a complaint about any one company. It is a structural observation about how global distribution rewards pace, recognisability, and the assumption that an audience will not wait. Slow cinema, almost by definition, asks the audience to wait.

What "Global South" actually means at the festival gate

The phrase itself has been overworked. In Cannes and Berlin programming, it functions less as a geographic designation than as a programming slot: films in languages other than English and French, often rural, often about land or labour or family. The label flattens considerable variety, but it also opens doors. Critics' Week's decision to open on "Cactus Pears" was a statement that a quiet Marathi film could anchor a sidebar that has previously launched louder debuts.

The trade-off is real. Once a film is positioned as a representative of its region or its language, the critical conversation narrows. Reviewers ask whether the film "speaks for" Maharashtra, or for rural India, or for queer India, rather than whether it works as a piece of cinema. Kanawade has handled this gracefully, but the pressure is visible across the festival slate, from Filipino entries to Senegalese ones.

A more durable framing treats these films as part of a global art-cinema conversation, not as ethnographic dispatches. That shift has begun in festival criticism; it has not yet reached the marketing layer.

The China exception, and why it is instructive

Away from Cannes, a different distribution question is being asked at industrial scale. The 2026 China International Supply Chain Expo, which opened in Beijing in mid-July, dedicated an entire Green Agriculture Chain pavilion to the journey of food from farm to table, a literal visualisation of supply-chain cinema in everything but name. The point is not the metaphor. It is that China is building end-to-end cultural and agricultural pipelines for its domestic market that the Global South's independent filmmakers cannot access on the export side.

For a Marathi feature, the equivalent would be a curated pipeline from village production to international festival to streaming shelf to international theatrical release, with financing that does not depend on a single sales agent's slate. That pipeline does not exist at present. The hope is that the next decade builds it.

The stakes, in plain terms

The case for slow cinema from the Global South is not aesthetic nostalgia. It is the argument that a global film culture which only circulates fast, legible, English-friendly work will end up with a flattened picture of what cinema can do. "Cactus Pears" is one film. The infrastructure that gets it seen, or fails to, is the actual subject.

The dates worth watching are the next eighteen months: the film's wider European release in early 2027, and the decisions by major streamers on whether runtimes of this kind fit their catalogues. If the answer continues to be no, the festival-to-streaming pipeline will keep narrowing for exactly the films that need it most.