Sanhya Suri’s police thriller selected as official UK submission to Oscars 2025

Still by “Santosh” | Photo credit: BFI

Director Sandhya Suri’s London-based Uttar Pradesh-set police thriller Santoshwhich premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, has been named the UK’s Oscar entry in the international feature category. The film, which features Hindi dialogues, revolves around a recently widowed housewife as she inherits her late husband’s job as a police constable and becomes embroiled in the investigation into the murder of a young girl.

“BAFTA is delighted to confirm that Sandhya Suri’s Santosh is the UK selection for next year’s International Feature Film Award at the Academy Awards,” the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) said in a statement.

Members of the BAFTA Selection Committee choose the UK’s entry to be presented at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPA) for the Best International Film category, which won Britain this year’s Oscar with The area of ​​interest.

Santoshwhich is also in contention for the first Sutherland Film Competition prize at this year’s BFI London Film Festival (LFF) starting next month, has been hailed as a “skillful thriller” and a complex character study of a female cop played by Shahana Goswami, whose moral conflict weaves together several themes of class, caste and intolerance.

“I’m not really someone who wants to make a film because they want to teach somebody anything. I don’t have a particular campaign or things to tick off. So I don’t like didactic films. But what I was interested in was the idea of ​​a type place,” Suri said PTI in an interview.

“The type of place where these things are right in the DNA of the place. It was about the type of place where this misogyny, this casteism, religious intolerance, it’s just hanging in the air. It’s just that this place is … it’s more of an observation , than pushing the messages that these things can casually exist in society and holding a mirror up to that and asking the question: If we put someone like Santosh, who was a housewife, in a place like that, how does he process all of that,” she said.

Suri, who is also a writer on the project, drew on her own Indian heritage and documentary expertise in shooting her first feature film in and around Lucknow over 44 days with the help of a talented local crew.

“I wanted to film because I’m originally from there and I also wanted to film in many places live. It was very important for me to have that feeling of authenticity. I come from a documentary and that makes me feel that I’m doing something real “, she shared, reflecting on all the background noise the crew had to contend with with the ongoing local festivities.

“It’s a director’s job to choose their great crew. I had such a fantastic and experienced Indian crew who just knew how to take it all in stride. We left enough time for everything and everyone was very good at staying very cool in a difficult situation,” he recalled she.

Suri, who was born and raised in Darlington, northeast England, finds herself constantly drawn to India, a country her father loved dearly. After an outing and theatrical release at his London Film Festival in the UK, the director is excited about plans in the works for Santosh to be released in India.

“It was a struggle from the beginning of this quite complex film to make it work for both places. So if you check it successfully in the UK and also in India are kind of the two most important things for me because I’m a director from the UK with very strong ties to India,” she said.