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.\u201cThere was always going to be rhetoric about: where do you live, and what are you going to say about India?\u201d Sandhya Suri knew that her debut feature, Santosh, a morally fraught portrait of an Indian policewoman, would raise eyebrows \u2014 especially as its maker was born and raised in Darlington, north-east England. \u201cThere\u2019s violence and corruption in every fibre of the film,\u201d she says. \u201cBut 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\u2019d met and the things I\u2019d seen.\u201dThe 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. \u201cI was seeing really horrible cases coming in on a daily basis,\u201d she says when we meet at The Bhavan, a centre for Indian arts in west London. \u201cI imagined showing that in the vein of Kim Longinotto\u2019s fantastic fly on the wall films, but I couldn\u2019t figure out how to do it \u2014 it didn\u2019t seem right. I wanted to get inside it and make sense of it in a deeper way.\u201d 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\u2019s 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. \u201cShe\u2019s not a good cop in a bad system,\u201d Suri says. \u201cI wasn\u2019t interested in that. Everybody\u2019s morally grey. I teach documentary students who say, \u2018I want to make a film because I want to say this.\u2019 OK, but what do you want to find out? This film is playful. You start thinking it\u2019s about a third-world widow in India, until suddenly you\u2019re in a genre film. I like to gearshift.\u201dSantosh, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was the UK\u2019s submission for the Best International Feature Film at this year\u2019s 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 \u201cmy police brothers, sisters and friends\u201d, who she says added considerably to its accuracy. Their input into a climactic interrogation scene included the precise implements used for beating: \u201cEven what\u2019s written on the club is the real thing.\u201dDespite me living outside India, they said it felt right, and complex in a way that feels true to life for most IndiansThe film\u2019s female violence may be its most shocking turn, I suggest. \u201cBut why?\u201d Suri wonders, surprised. \u201cGiven all that happens to women in the world, the idea that rage may be part of the female response seems only natural to me.\u201d 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. \u201cSo many women, not just Indian women, have contacted me about that scene because they have lived it every day. They\u2019re fist-pumping, because they feel it very deeply. They have swallowed and swallowed until at some point it just comes out.\u201dThis is a film of multiple trapdoors in which crimes lie behind crimes, the societal implications that arise recalling American thrillers of the Watergate era. \u201cChinatown and a certain kind of gritty 1970s American film, where the grime is so inset and the corruption so deep, is in my film\u2019s DNA,\u201d Suri says. \u201cThere was never going to be any revenge or catharsis, because in its [Indian] context, that\u2019s just how it is. There\u2019s nothing to be done.\u201d 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\u2019s 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. \u201cThe censor board gave it an A [adult] rating,\u201d Suri says, \u201cbut they asked for so many cuts that they couldn\u2019t even be numbered.\u201d Screenings at the Mumbai International Film Festival received a positive response. \u201c[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\u2019s my victory.\u201d 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. \u201cI inherited his nostalgia,\u201d Suri says. \u201cI 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\u2019s in my blood. And now as a mother I try to get my daughter to have that as well.\u201d In The Bhavan as we speak, Suri\u2019s daughter is taking Indian classical dance lessons, as her mother did before her.Suri\u2019s British upbringing has not so far informed her work to the same degree. \u201cLooking at it through my father\u2019s 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\u2019t quite known what to do with exploring Britishness in filmmaking terms. Making a film about the diaspora just because I\u2019m diasporic doesn\u2019t excite me.\u201cIn India, of course I\u2019m always going to be on the outside,\u201d Suri concludes. \u201cBut as a filmmaker I can be an insider, doing my research and finding a way to move my camera into space that you wouldn\u2019t normally have access to. There\u2019s joy in that. Filmmaking is my way into India \u2014 and I want to go deeper every time.\u201d\u2018Santosh\u2019 is in UK cinemas from March 21Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u201cThere was always going to be rhetoric about: where do you live, and what are you going to say about India?\u201d Sandhya Suri knew that her debut<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":247415,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-247414","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247414"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247416,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247414\/revisions\/247416"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}