How Sandhya Suri unlocked the key to ‘Santosh,’ her feature debut

“Santosh,” the United Kingdom’s submission for the international feature Oscar, originally was intended as a documentary, but it became Sandhya Suri’s feature debut instead.

Suri was researching the pervasive climate of sexual violence against women for a follow-up to her Sundance award-winning documentary “I for India.” She reviewed brutal cases but felt creatively hindered by an inability to dissect the violence in a meaningful way. That changed in 2012, when a 22-year-old woman, Jyoti Singh, was gang raped while traveling on a bus in New Delhi. Her eventual death drew worldwide condemnation, and public protesters soon clashed with local law enforcement over the lack of legal protections for women. During media coverage of the protests, an unexpected image drew Suri’s attention.

“It was of very angry female protesters almost spitting with hatred in the face of a female constable,” Suri recalls. “I saw that female constable, and I looked at the expression on her face, which was totally enigmatic, and I thought, ‘OK, that’s how I’m going to tell the story. I’m going to tell the story through her, because she’s on both ends of everything.’ And that just obviously then opened up a fiction, opened up genre, opened up many difficult things.”

“Santosh” follows the title character, a widow (Shahana Goswami) who inherits her deceased husband’s position within the police force through a lawful, compassionate appointment. One of her first cases involves the death of a young woman from a lower caste. As she attempts to cut through prevalent misogyny from all sides, she is assisted by a more senior officer, Geeta (Sunita Rajwar), who is impressed by Santosh’s work ethic. Exploring a mentor-mentee relationship was always something Suri wanted to tackle in a narrative project.

Sandhya Suri had intended to make a documentary about India’s violence against women, but a feature proved to be the more meaningful approach.

(Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for BFI)

“I thought that it would be interesting to really give that female relationship its full complexity and not just make it sisterhood against a patriarchy, which I thought would be kind of boring,” Suri explains. “I just wanted to explore how love and admiration and mentorship can exist at the same time as manipulation and other darker aspects of that relationship.”

Whether it’s documentary or fiction, basing her work in reality is of utmost importance to the British-born Suri. Truth be told, the reason the film took so long to come together was that Suri had to find the right access to “stand behind everything” she presented onscreen. Intriguingly, her inspirations for Santosh and Geeta came from women she encountered outside of the police force.

“I met lots of different types of women who’ve inspired me along the years, who leave little fragments in your brain and inspire you to write something,” Suri says. “So it wasn’t particularly about women I met in the police, although I have spent a lot of time with women who’ve come to this appointment on compassionate grounds.”

Shahana Goswami stars as a widow who inherits her husband’s position on the police force in “Santosh.”

(Festival de Cannes)

Grounding the film meant looking for nonprofessionals for roles beyond the experienced actors portraying her leads. She plucked one first-timer from the catering team. Another newcomer, who ended up in the pivotal role of the mother of the deceased girl, unknowingly introduced herself while production was prepping to film at a police station.

Suri recalls, “She comes out, she’s beaming at us like, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’ This big 2-meter-high Dutch director of photography, she’s not at all fazed by him. ‘Hey, what’s this? What’s this?’ And I just thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to cast her in something.’ And my producers were like, ‘Yeah, maybe the lady works in the canteen.’ I’m like, ‘No, no, I think we’re going to do the girl’s mother,’ ‘But she can’t read or write.’ ‘Oh, we’ll just learn the lines.’ So, some things were like that. For some things, we had local casting directors.”

“Santosh,” which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, will finally arrive in Indian theaters Jan. 10. Suri was relieved by the reaction following its Indian premiere at the Mumbai Film Festival in October but knows general audiences may react differently — especially with the film’s observations regarding the caste system, police corruption and Islamophobia.

Suri says leading lady Goswami summed it up, remarking, “I don’t feel this is going to be received as controversial because it’s done with a light touch that it’s everywhere.”

For Suri, the movie is “about a tapestry of prejudice rather than pointing fingers at anything. It acts more like a mirror for an audience to see where they sit in relation to all of those things and ask questions. So I think it’s a film that you could really go and have a good discourse about afterward in and outside of India, actually,” she says. “But whether or not someone will jump on and politicize this, I have no idea. I’m sure that will also happen, but I’m ready.”