Documentarian and narrative filmmaker Sandhya Suri remembers being struck by a picture taken throughout protests over the horrific gang rape and homicide of Jyoti Singh by six males on a bus in Delhi.
“On this {photograph} there was a line of feminine cops standing in opposition to a crowd of ferociously indignant girls. There was one police officer, and she or he has this wonderful expression on her face, actually enigmatic. Who’s that girl, what’s she considering? She has a police uniform that holds a lot energy particularly in India,” she questioned. “What was it prefer to be her?”
It was an idle thought on the time however which then took maintain of the South London-based British-Indian filmmaker who needed to make a movie that targeted on violence in opposition to girls.
Following a decade of analysis and workshops on the Sundance Labs, Suri debuted Santosh, at this 12 months’s Cannes Movie Pageant the place it performed within the Un Sure Regard strand.
Since then she has criss-crossed continents displaying the film at festivals from Telluride to London and past. The largest increase for the Hindi-language drama, backed by the BFI, BBC Movie and Good Chaos, was when it was chosen by BAFTA because the UK submission for the Greatest Worldwide Movie Oscar.
It’s a shocking movie that stars Shahana Goswami (Zwigato, Hush Hush) within the title function of Santosh Saini, a widow who, on account of a authorities statute, takes over the police constable job her late husband had held.
Shahana Goswami on the Deadline Portrait Studio throughout the 77th Cannes Movie Pageant in Cannes, France.
Michael Buckner for Deadline
The brand new publish offers Saini room to breathe. She will transfer out of the cramped house she’s been pressured to share along with her decidedly disagreeable in-laws, and into lodging supplied by the drive in a city in northern India.
“I by no means needed to make a police movie,” Suri explains. “However once I noticed that {photograph} of the police girl, I assumed: ‘That’ll be my approach in’”.
“After which I began investigating police and I discovered about this authorities scheme the place if you’re low revenue, you inherit your father’s or husband’s job. I’m like, wow, that’s a standing. Spouse goes from being a spouse to a widow, to turning into a police girl, which is a loopy journey,” Suri exclaims.
Santosh takes on a couple of mundane circumstances, however then one snowballs — the harrowing scenario of a low-caste teen woman who has been violently sexually abused and murdered.
The movie is greater than a police procedural, nonetheless. The cop side underpins one thing deeper. The investigation Santosh launches turns into mired in gender and sophistication prejudice and corruption.
“I feel for me it’s extra about having females who’re making morally complicated selections,” Suri notes. “I feel that’s what’s lacking [from other films]. I feel we have now quite a lot of females in movies. We even have fairly a couple of leads in movies generally. However for me, I used to be actually focused on complicated ethical choices {that a} girl has to make. And this character, and what she has to undergo in investigating the case, was like the right automobile to inform that.”
Sandhya Suri At The 2024 Telluride’s Movie Pageant. Photograph: Baz Bamigboye/Deadline
Suri was raised in Darlington, close to Newcastle, within the Northeast of England and now lives in Brixton, South London. She graduated in pure arithmetic and German, and obtained a scholarship to check documentary filmmaking at The Nationwide Movie and Tv Faculty. Her debut characteristic documentary I For India premiered within the World Competitors part of the 2006 Sundance Movie Pageant.
Different movies proved tougher to get off the bottom and she or he then spent three years working the Oxfam UK movie unit which concerned her travelling to catastrophe spots everywhere in the world. After departing Oxfam, she resumed documentary filmmaking.
Due to her prior relationship with Sundance, she contacted the Sundance Institute “and I simply advised them about this concept they usually, as a result of my characteristic had been at Sundance, they stated I ought to write that and submit it to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.
“And that’s what I did,” she says smiling. Suri was chosen to hitch this system in 2016.
“I’d by no means written any fiction earlier than however I acquired on the author’s lab and the director’s lab and it was instrumental in accessing all these wonderful mentors who helped me. So by the point I’d come to UK financing, or any financing, the script was already in a very good place,” she provides.
Suri laughs as she remembers taking up a writing task on the Sundance Lab “and I search for, look behind me and there’s Robert Redford watching me working.”
She used the chance at Sundance to do an amazing quantity of analysis on the movie “as a result of I’m coming from documentaries and I’m out of the blue making a style movie and I’m actually nervous as a result of that’s a bizarre place to go for a documentary maker,” she provides.
Suri was additionally capable of journey to India to totally discover her matter. “So with a view to really feel kind of secure with the fiction, I knew that I might solely make a movie like this if it was meticulously researched. So, I took quite a lot of time getting entry, very troublesome entry, and spending time with police individuals.”
Suri knew that shifting from documentary to narrative characteristic filmmaking “was going to be a gear shift.”
She provides: “You may suppose you’re coming into some third world drama about widows in India after which impulsively like, ‘oh, I’m in a police movie.’ After which even on the finish, it’s probably not about who completed it. So I really like enjoying like that, not in a tricksy approach, however in a approach that feels natural and centered. I don’t wish to trick audiences, however on the identical time I do prefer to hold them engaged and giving house to them. It’s a really complicated movie to attempt to make work in India and within the UK. There’s rather a lot in there culturally. I feel in case you give religion and you’ve got a great contract and good religion together with your viewers then they are going to have interaction with it. In order that’s what I attempt to do on Santosh.”
Shahana Goswami, Sandhya Suri and Sunita Rajwar on the Deadline Portrait Studio throughout the 77th Cannes Movie Pageant in Cannes, France.
Michael Buckner for Deadline
Personal financing was supplied in India “fairly early on” as a result of, popping out of the Sundance Labs, her script stayed fairly solidly the place it was, though she acknowledges that ”in fact there have been some adjustments,” however minor ones.
She contemplated over the truth that had she made the film years earlier she would have “been the primary” to deal with the subject of policing in India and sexual assaults on girls there, “however now I really feel like I’m actually stable in what I’ve made as a result of I took the time.”
Suri says there have been two methods she might have solid Santosh‘s lead character. “I might simply have solid her as a naive housewife who will get thrown into this scenario. Perhaps it was a extra boring model of who she might be.”
She primarily based Santosh the character not solely on the officer within the {photograph}, but additionally “on a lady I’d met who truly had been severely harassed by her in-laws once I was working with one in every of these NGOs once I was at Oxfam.
“The in-laws had tried to kill her a couple of occasions, however she was so feisty, and was simply so sturdy and so good at manoeuvring issues,” and the imaginative and prescient of that girl stayed along with her.
In one of many final days of casting, her casting director instructed she meet with Shahana Goswami.
“She got here within the room and I used to be considering, she’s so instinctive and she or he’s such a tough employee, there’s no diva behaviour,” she marvels.
Goswami’s completely plausible within the function as she goes from seemingly naive widow to astute investigator, though her ethical compass adjusts the deeper she digs.
“I like the concept that possibly she was extra corrupt than her husband. There’s a line once they say that he was a person of integrity, her husband, and I really like this concept that instinctively she’s not as an individual, she doesn’t have as a lot integrity as him,” she says.
“And I met many ladies who had are available in on the federal government scheme. It was fascinating. A few of them had by no means even left their houses earlier than their husband died. This was the primary time they have been telling me that earlier than their husband died, they might at all times have an escort to go to the market,” Suri tells us as her eyes widen.
Sunita Rajwar (Gullah, Panchayat), enjoying Santosh’s superior, has turned in a wonderfully wrenching efficiency. In the meantime, cinematographer Lennert Hillege’s cameras have captured the murkiness, grime and sloppy sweat that seeps into each body, adeptly edited by Maxime Pozzi-Garcia.
Sunita Rajwar (l) with Shahana Goswami in ‘Santosh’. Photograph: MK2 Movies
The movie is produced by Mike Goodridge, James Bowsher, Balthazar de Ganay, and Alan McAlex. Govt producers are Ama Ampadu, Eva Yates, Diarmid Scrimshaw, Lucia Haslauer, and Martin Gerhard. The movie is produced by Good Chaos, with co-producers Razor Movie and Haut et Court docket, and is financed by BFI and BBC Movie.
In between chaperoning Santosh by means of awards season, Suri has been writing a screenplay for BBC Movie, which she will even direct. “It’s a J.G. Ballard novella that I’m doing an adaptation of,” she says, declining to disclose its title. Nevertheless, Suri allowed that it’s “a dystopian love story.”