Santosh

Sandhya Suri's Santosh premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 77th Cannes Film Festival in May 2024 and is the British-Indian writer-director's first narrative feature, after the documentary work that includes I for India (2005) and Around India with a Movie Camera (2018). It is a UK-India-Germany-France co-production produced by James Bowsher and Mike Goodridge, shot in Hindi entirely on location in Uttar Pradesh. The film was selected as the United Kingdom's submission for the 2025 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and went on to make the shortlist of fifteen.

Shahana Goswami leads as Santosh, opposite Sunita Rajwar as the senior inspector Geeta Sharma. Cinematographer Lennert Hillege (The Octopus and I) works in a hand-held naturalist register that owes more to Italian neorealism than to the saturated palette typically associated with Bollywood; the score is by Cypriot-British composer Aigerim Seilova. The film is one of the few Indian-set police procedurals to have been led by women on both sides of the camera.

It received warm festival reception in Variety, Screen International and The Guardian, the latter calling it “a propulsive neo-noir that packs a powerful punch.” Suri received a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut, and the BIFA awards recognised the producing team. The film has since opened theatrically in the UK, the US (via Metrograph Pictures) and across continental Europe, and was the subject of considerable debate in India, where it has not received commercial release.