India-made film Santosh has been nominated for the Oscars 2025 under the ‘Best International Feature’ category, representing the United Kingdom. The Hindi-language crime drama traces the journey of a young widow, Santosh, who takes on her deceased husband’s role as a police officer and investigates a murder. The film stars Shahana Goswami and Sunita Rajwar among others.
Santosh premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard category. Notably, it is a feature film debut for director Sandhya Suri, a prominent British-Indian filmmaker known for her award-winning documentaries and short films like I for India and The Field.
What Inspired Santosh?
Speaking to the UK media outlet, The Upcoming, Suri shared that the idea for Santosh was born “quite organically.” She recalled a photograph she saw of a female police officer investigating the 2012 Delhi gang rape case, which eventually inspired the character Santosh.
“A photo came out of a very angry crowd in Delhi and a female police officer in front of them… I got hooked on her. I just thought, ‘She has the power but she doesn’t have the power. She’s them but she’s not them. She feels their pain, yet, she maybe doesn’t.’ I was intrigued and thought that’s through whom I tell the story and dissect the violence [against women].”
Who Is Sandhya Suri? Mathematician-Turned-Filmmaker
Sandhya Suri is a documentarian who made her feature film debut directing Santosh. She was born to Indian immigrants in England and grew up in Darlington. Suri initially pursued a degree in mathematics and worked as a teacher in Japan before finding her calling in films.
Suri studied documentary filmmaking at the National Film and Television School. Her first documentary, I for India (2005) traced her father’s experiences as an Indian immigrant in the UK. The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.
In 2018 Suri released the narrative short film The Field, about a woman farmer in Haryana and her clandestine love affair. The film won Best International Short Film at the Toronto Film Festival 2018 and Best Fiction Short Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2019.
Suri began filming Santosh in 2016, in and around Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. The filmmaker and single mom told The Upcoming about the challenges of working continents apart from her daughter; and in a lesser-familiar location. She called the experience a “very steep learning curve.”
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