Although Sandhya Suri was born and raised in England, all her film projects have been about her ancestral country of origin. Her debut documentary I for India (2005) was based on home video footage shot by her father after he emigrated to England in the 1960s. Around India with a Movie Camera (2018) was a compilation of films made during British colonial rule.
Suri’s fictional drama Santosh takes place in a small town in north India. Shahana Goswami plays the titular character, who is given her deceased husband’s job as a police constable on compassionate grounds.
Santosh’s investigation into a Dalit teenager’s rape and murder takes the young woman on a journey towards understanding power, social hierarchy and the nature of justice. Santosh also has a momentous encounter with Geeta Sharma, a senior police officer played by Sunita Rajwar.
Suri’s feature debut was premiered in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section in 2024. In a review, Scroll called the movie “a thoughtful study of power and powerlessness in Indian policing”, which “deftly personalises the manner in which gender dynamics, caste, community honour and religion skewer the pursuit of fairness”.
Santosh was United Kingdom’s entry for Best International Feature Film, and made it to the short list. The film will be released on March 21 across the UK (a scheduled India release hasn’t happened yet). Suri spoke to Scroll about the inspirations behind Santosh, her background in documentary and her relationship with India. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You started out in documentary before moving into fiction. Are these two realms that different from one another?
It was never really a career move into fiction. It came organically from the fact that Santosh could not be told as a documentary.
The story came out of documentary facts and research. Once it landed on the idea of the female constable being hired on compassionate grounds, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be a documentary.
In film school, the fiction people and the documentary people are two separate tribes. We think we’re down to earth and honest but after a while of making documentaries, we understand that actually we’re much more morally compromised than anybody else.
For me, everything is about emotion and intention. What used to worry me about fiction was the idea that you had to make these choices that seemed arbitrary – like what colour is the wall, or what should she wear?
While moving into fiction, I understood the pleasure of those decisions that were coming out of a deep knowledge of the story, characters and scenes. Just like in documentary, in scriptwriting for fiction, echoes of stories and threads come through in an organic way.
Is Santosh based on a real person? Or she is a composite of several women?
I have met many interesting women in my travels who have been amalgamated into Santosh. But the idea of the cop came from my wanting to do a film about violence against women. I wanted to talk about places where violence is a casual, normal thing.
During a protest against Nirbhaya [the 2012 gang-rape and murder of a physiotherapy intern in Delhi], I saw a photograph of female protesters facing a female cop. That cop had such an interesting expression on her face. She was one of them and she wasn’t one of them. She was the way in.
Santosh has a complex journey that involves duty, complicity and her own interpretation of justice. What went into creating the character?
I always wanted Santosh to be ambitious, to be looking for contentment. She was a bit hungry, maybe even as a housewife. In my mind, maybe her husband wasn’t like that.
Santosh is sort of a blank sheet when she comes into the police force. We meet her in trauma. She’s just found out about her husband’s death. She’s looking for an opportunity to regain the status she has lost, but she’s in a world where everything is hierarchical.
She’s accessing not just the bad power of the uniform but also the ability to help someone. The idea was also to see how she becomes politicised very casually, how she is drip-fed casual Islamophobia.
Sunita Rajawar’s police officer Geeta Sharma is an excellent foil to Santosh.
I have always wanted to do a film about a mentor-mentee relationship. It’s easy to make a film about female solidarity against patriarchies, but that was kind of boring for me.
Sharma is the type of woman Santosh has never encountered in her life. Sharma encourages Santosh and lifts her, in a way.
Women are very complex creatures, and women together are all the more complex. You add on to that the idea of a woman who’s been in the police force for a long time, has got to where she’s got to for certain reasons, and is drawn to Santosh for her freshness and innocence. That’s fertile ground for interesting things to happen.
Patriarchy itself is a complex thing, as we discover in the movie.
Even as a documentary maker, I was never into making campaign films. I ran the film unit for Oxfam for almost four years, and it was always about trying to transmit the humanity of a person and bring her close to you.
I teach too, so that I can make films. I do not make films to teach. Didactic is not what I intended with Santosh in any way.
I like the idea that you might start Santosh and feel that it’s a Third World drama about widows and the status of women in India and then you realise that it’s a cop film.
Police procedurals with social messaging are widely prevalent in films and streaming shows. Were you conscious of this while making Santosh?
The film was conceived in 2015. At the time, there was nothing. By the time the film got made, there was loads of stuff coming out.
What do you do? As a filmmaker, I can either shelve the script or do everything I can to make it stand to the highest quality – bring a level of detail, weight and authenticity.
What conversations did you have with cinematographer Lennert Hillege?
The film needed to be immersive. We are literally at Santosh’s shoulder with her. We discussed what we could in the imagery to allow us to do that. We leaned heavily into genre elements as Santosh moves in to investigate.
There was a lot of push and pull, but it always came back to the story. A lot of the images were already written into the film, and Lennert made them sublime. For the train shot at the end, Lennert decided to use a zoom that draw us in.
In a Scroll profile of Shahana Goswami ahead of the Cannes premiere, you had spoken about how she had “the right mix of hardness and sweetness, anger held within restraint, energy and a hunger I always saw in Santosh, a wanting for something more.”
What has the reaction to Goswami’s performance been?
I’m so happy about how audiences have responded to Shahana. Everybody who comments on the film comments on her and how wonderfully she carries it.
I find her so iconic in this role. She’s an instinctive actress. She’s open. Her first guess is usually very good. It’s very easy to work together.
We haven’t got mass hysteria behind this film. It’s been building slowly and quietly, like Santosh herself. I feel that Shahana and her performance will stand the test of time.
Where had you seen Sunita Rajawar before casting her?
I think I had seen her in [the web series] Panchayat. Everything about her was visually correct.
She has both sadness and jolliness in her eyes. She's a very lived-in body and face that feel real. She made Sharma feel less like an archetype and much more like a real person.
Your previous films have also been about India. What is your relationship to your country of origin?
My relationship to India is very, very deep. It was initially refracted through my father. My father had such a yearning for India, such a love for his motherland, but he also cared deeply about her problems. I too had that same feeling.
Santosh carries that same feeling of care for India. I come to India for weddings, but I tend to get restless. Researching something in India or being there in a different form where I can raise my engagement to a deeper level – that will always be the stronger part of my relationship.
Also read:
‘Santosh’ review: A thoughtful study of power and powerlessness
How actor Shahana Goswami flies under the radar and above the competition
