A film by Sandhya Suri
Great Britain/France/India/Germany 2024, 128 min
NRW-Premiere
Followed by an online film talk with the leading actress Shahana Goswami.
A government programme leads to the newly widowed Santosh taking over her late husband’s job as a policewoman in the remote, rural areas of northern India. When a girl from a lower caste is murdered, Santosh is drawn into the investigation by the charismatic feminist inspector Sharma.
A thriller with a feminist flavour about the search for justice, the courage of the new generation of women and the scope and limits of social change.
Santosh was this year’s British entry for the Oscars. Sandhya Suri was nominated for the BAFTA and the European Film Awards and won the prize for best feature film at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva.
Director & screenplay: Sandhya Suri – Director of photography: Lennert Hillege – Editor: Maxime Pozzi-Garcia – Music: Luisa Gerstein – With Shahana Goswami, Sunita Rajwar, Nawal Shukla, Pratibha Awasthy and others. – World Sales: MK2 Films, mk2films.com
Sandhya Suri
Sandhya Suri was born and raised in Darlington, England. After earning a degree in mathematics, Suri worked as a teacher in Japan. Her experiences documenting this period on camera inspired her to study documentary filmmaking at the National Film and Television School. In 2005, Suri’s released the documentary I for India detailing her father’s experiences as a 20th-century Indian immigrant in the United Kingdom based on his own tape recordings. I for India was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.
Suri’s second film, the silent 2018 documentary Around India with a Movie Camera, used archival British Film Institute footage to explore life in British India. That same year, Suri released the narrative short film The Field, which was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Short Film in 2019.
Suri’s narrative feature debut, Santosh was selected to screen in the Un Certain Regard portion of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. She first began work on Santosh in 2016 when she was accepted to the Sundance Institute Director’s Lab.
