Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.“There was always going to be rhetoric about: where do you live, and what are you going to say about India?” Sandhya Suri knew that her debut feature, Santosh, a morally fraught portrait of an Indian policewoman, would raise eyebrows — especially as its maker was born and raised in Darlington, north-east England. “There’s violence and corruption in every fibre of the film,” she says. “But my care was to make it as real as possible, so that if I show it to a group of my cop friends, they will understand that I know what their daily lives are like. Everything was grounded in the women I’d met and the things I’d seen.”The film grew out of a desire to document the violence against women that Suri had witnessed while working with NGOs in India in the early 2010s. “I was seeing really horrible cases coming in on a daily basis,” she says when we meet at The Bhavan, a centre for Indian arts in west London. “I imagined showing that in the vein of Kim Longinotto’s fantastic fly on the wall films, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it — it didn’t seem right. I wanted to get inside it and make sense of it in a deeper way.” A photograph of a mysteriously smiling policewoman at protests sparked by the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh on a Delhi bus in 2012 inspired Suri to create the enigmatic, watchful Santosh.Shahana Goswami plays the protagonist, who inherits her late husband’s job as a police officer through a government scheme to help vulnerable dependants, and is assigned to investigate the murder of a low-caste country girl. She encounters pervasive misogyny, sexual repression, casteism and corruption, which builds a pressure that, perversely, finally explodes into female violence. “She’s not a good cop in a bad system,” Suri says. “I wasn’t interested in that. Everybody’s morally grey. I teach documentary students who say, ‘I want to make a film because I want to say this.’ OK, but what do you want to find out? This film is playful. You start thinking it’s about a third-world widow in India, until suddenly you’re in a genre film. I like to gearshift.”Santosh, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was the UK’s submission for the Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards, was shot in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Suri cast local non-professionals in supporting roles and scouted locations such as the seedy Lucknow hotel where Santosh pursues a male suspect in a scene of clammy nocturnal suspense, as real guests pass by. The director dedicates her film to “my police brothers, sisters and friends”, who she says added considerably to its accuracy. Their input into a climactic interrogation scene included the precise implements used for beating: “Even what’s written on the club is the real thing.”Despite me living outside India, they said it felt right, and complex in a way that feels true to life for most IndiansThe film’s female violence may be its most shocking turn, I suggest. “But why?” Suri wonders, surprised. “Given all that happens to women in the world, the idea that rage may be part of the female response seems only natural to me.” There is plenty of provocation. Suri cites a scene in which Santosh reacts to a man staring at her in a restaurant by holding his gaze and stuffing her mouth with food until she spews it all back out. “So many women, not just Indian women, have contacted me about that scene because they have lived it every day. They’re fist-pumping, because they feel it very deeply. They have swallowed and swallowed until at some point it just comes out.”This is a film of multiple trapdoors in which crimes lie behind crimes, the societal implications that arise recalling American thrillers of the Watergate era. “Chinatown and a certain kind of gritty 1970s American film, where the grime is so inset and the corruption so deep, is in my film’s DNA,” Suri says. “There was never going to be any revenge or catharsis, because in its [Indian] context, that’s just how it is. There’s nothing to be done.” This desire for authenticity is evident in her work as a documentarist, beginning with the autobiographical I for India (2005) and exploration of the British Film Institute’s British Raj archives, Around India with a Movie Camera (2018). Perhaps because of its blunt depiction of police brutality and casteism, Santosh has proved impossible to release in India. “The censor board gave it an A [adult] rating,” Suri says, “but they asked for so many cuts that they couldn’t even be numbered.” Screenings at the Mumbai International Film Festival received a positive response. “[People had] heard a lot about it, and despite me living outside India, they said it felt right, and complex in a way that feels true to life for most Indians. That’s my victory.” Her relationship with India is at the heart of all her films, perhaps most profoundly in I for India, which was based on Super 8 films and tape reels made by her doctor father, who moved to Darlington to work for the NHS in 1965. He would exchange these recordings documenting his new life with his family in India. “I inherited his nostalgia,” Suri says. “I yearned for the myth of a black-and-white India that was no longer there, just like he did. I listened to the film music he listened to, and I felt those songs so deeply. It’s in my blood. And now as a mother I try to get my daughter to have that as well.” In The Bhavan as we speak, Suri’s daughter is taking Indian classical dance lessons, as her mother did before her.Suri’s British upbringing has not so far informed her work to the same degree. “Looking at it through my father’s eyes and feeling how Darlington became his home over time feels very deep to me, and I have a great love for Darlington. But I haven’t quite known what to do with exploring Britishness in filmmaking terms. Making a film about the diaspora just because I’m diasporic doesn’t excite me.“In India, of course I’m always going to be on the outside,” Suri concludes. “But as a filmmaker I can be an insider, doing my research and finding a way to move my camera into space that you wouldn’t normally have access to. There’s joy in that. Filmmaking is my way into India — and I want to go deeper every time.”‘Santosh’ is in UK cinemas from March 21Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
