’Santosh’s’ Sandhya Suri On Making Her Breakthrough Narrative Feature

Documentarian and narrative filmmaker Sandhya Suri recalls being struck by an image taken during protests over the horrific gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh by six men on a bus in Delhi.

“In this photograph there was a line of female police officers standing against a crowd of ferociously angry women. There was one police officer, and she has this amazing expression on her face, really enigmatic. Who is that woman, what is she thinking? She has a police uniform that holds so much power especially in India,” she wondered. “What was it like to be her?”

It was an idle thought at the time but which then took hold of the South London-based British-Indian filmmaker who wanted to make a film that focused on violence against women.

Following a decade of research and workshops at the Sundance Labs, Suri debuted Santosh, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival where it played in the Un Certain Regard strand. 

Since then she has criss-crossed continents showing the movie at festivals from Telluride to London and beyond. The biggest boost for the Hindi-language drama, backed by the BFI, BBC Film and Good Chaos, was when it was selected by BAFTA as the UK submission for the Best International Film Oscar.

It’s a stunning film that stars Shahana Goswami (Zwigato, Hush Hush) in the title role of Santosh Saini, a widow who, due to a government statute, takes over the police constable job her late husband had held.   

The new post gives Saini room to breathe. She can move out of the cramped home she’s been forced to share with her decidedly unpleasant in-laws, and into accommodation provided by the force in a town in northern India.

“I never wanted to make a police film,” Suri explains. “But when I saw that photograph of the police woman, I thought: ‘That’ll be my way in’”.

“And then I started investigating police and I found out about this government scheme where if you are low income, you inherit your father’s or husband’s job. I’m like, wow, that’s a status. Wife goes from being a wife to a widow, to becoming a police woman, which is a crazy journey,” Suri exclaims.

Santosh takes on a few mundane cases, but then one snowballs — the harrowing situation of a low-caste teen girl who has been violently sexually abused and murdered.

The film is more than a police procedural, however. The cop aspect underpins something deeper. The investigation Santosh launches becomes mired in gender and class prejudice and corruption.

“I think for me it’s more about having females who are making morally complex choices,” Suri notes. “I think that’s what’s missing [from other films]. I think we have a lot of females in films. We also have quite a few leads in films sometimes. But for me, I was really interested in complex moral decisions that a woman has to make. And this character, and what she has to go through in investigating the case, was like the perfect vehicle to tell that.”

Suri was raised in Darlington, near Newcastle, in the Northeast of England and now lives in Brixton, South London. She graduated in pure mathematics and German, and received a scholarship to study documentary filmmaking at The National Film and Television School. Her debut feature documentary I For India premiered in the World Competition section of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. 

Other films proved harder to get off the ground and she then spent three years running the Oxfam UK film unit which involved her travelling to disaster spots all over the world. After departing Oxfam, she resumed documentary filmmaking.

Because of her prior relationship with Sundance, she contacted the Sundance Institute “and I just told them about this idea and they, because my feature had been at Sundance, they said I should write that and submit it to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. 

“And that’s what I did,” she says smiling. Suri was selected to join the program in 2016.

“I’d never written any fiction before but I got on the writer’s lab and the director’s lab and it was instrumental in having access to all these amazing mentors who helped me. So by the time I’d come to UK financing, or any financing, the script was already in a really good place,” she adds.

Suri laughs as she recalls taking on a writing assignment at the Sundance Lab “and I look up, look behind me and there’s Robert Redford watching me working.”

She used the opportunity at Sundance to do a tremendous amount of research on the film “because I’m coming from documentaries and I’m suddenly making a genre film and I’m really nervous because that’s a weird place to go for a documentary maker,” she adds.

Suri was also able to travel to India to thoroughly explore her topic. “So in order to feel sort of safe with the fiction, I knew that I could only make a film like this if it was meticulously researched. So, I took a lot of time getting access, very difficult access, and spending time with police people.”  

Suri knew that moving from documentary to narrative feature filmmaking “was going to be a gear shift.”

She adds: “You might think you’re entering some third world drama about widows in India and then all of a sudden like, ‘oh, I’m in a police film.’  And then even at the end, it’s not really about who done it. So I love playing like that, not in a tricksy way, but in a way that feels organic and centered. I don’t want to trick audiences, but at the same time I do like to keep them engaged and giving space to them. It’s a very complex film to try to make work in India and in the UK. There’s a lot in there culturally. I think if you give faith and you have a good contract and good faith with your audience then they will engage with it. So that’s what I try to do on Santosh.”

Private financing was offered in India “quite early on” because, coming out of the Sundance Labs, her script stayed quite solidly where it was, although she acknowledges that ”of course there were some changes,” but minor ones. 

She pondered over the fact that had she made the movie years earlier she would have “been the first” to tackle the topic of policing in India and sexual attacks on women there, “but now I feel like I’m really solid in what I’ve made because I took the time.”

Suri says there were two ways she could have cast Santosh‘s lead character. “I could easily have cast her as a naive housewife who gets thrown into this situation. Maybe it was a more boring version of who she could be.”

She based Santosh the character not only on the officer in the photograph, but also “on a woman I’d met who actually had been severely harassed by her in-laws when I was working with one of these NGOs when I was at Oxfam.

“The in-laws had tried to kill her a few times, but she was so feisty, and was just so strong and so good at manoeuvring things,” and the vision of that woman stayed with her.

In one of the last days of casting, her casting director suggested she meet with Shahana Goswami.

“She came in the room and I was thinking, she’s so instinctive and she’s such a hard worker, there’s no diva behaviour,” she marvels.

Goswami’s totally believable in the role as she goes from seemingly naive widow to astute investigator, although her moral compass adjusts the deeper she digs.

“I like the idea that maybe she was more corrupt than her husband. There’s a line when they say that he was a man of integrity, her husband, and I love this idea that instinctively she’s not as a person, she doesn’t have as much integrity as him,” she says.

“And I met many women who had come in on the government scheme. It was fascinating. Some of them had never even left their homes before their husband died. This was the first time they were telling me that before their husband died, they would always have an escort to go to the market,” Suri tells us as her eyes widen.

Sunita Rajwar (Gullah, Panchayat), playing Santosh’s superior, has turned in a superbly wrenching performance. Meanwhile, cinematographer Lennert Hillege’s cameras have captured the murkiness, grime and sloppy sweat that seeps into every frame, adeptly edited by Maxime Pozzi-Garcia. 

The film is produced by Mike Goodridge, James Bowsher, Balthazar de Ganay, and Alan McAlex. Executive producers are Ama Ampadu, Eva Yates, Diarmid Scrimshaw, Lucia Haslauer, and Martin Gerhard. The film is produced by Good Chaos, with co-producers Razor Film and Haut et Court, and is financed by BFI and BBC Film.

In between chaperoning Santosh through awards season, Suri has been writing a screenplay for BBC Film, which she will also direct. “It’s a J.G. Ballard novella that I’m doing an adaptation of,” she says, declining to reveal its title. However, Suri allowed that it’s “a dystopian love story.”