Ripped from her life of domesticity, Santosh, a young widow now desperate to 
support herself, accepts an opportunity to 
inherit her husband’s job as a police officer in the rural badlands of India. Quickly taken under the wing of Sharma, a charismatic and commanding older female inspector, Santosh begins an investigation into a low-caste girl’s brutal murder that plunges her into a gritty world of crime and corruption, forcing her to confront not only the brokenness of the system around her, but her own place within it. Her first major investigation—answering an impoverished father’s plea to find 
his missing teen daughter, a case no one seems to care about—throws her into an abyss. But it is Shahana Goswami’s immersive, moving performance that brings the audience not only along for the dark truths Santosh discovers but into her 
thrilling internal transformation. As clues unravel, so too does Santosh’s idea of who she might become in her new reality. Writer / director Sandhya Suri’s story unfold through raw, seamlessly naturalistic storytelling, gliding from atmospheric neo-noir thriller to penetrating social commentary to moving portrait of a woman figuring out how to strike out on her own path, then leveling that path to search for something better. SANTOSH features a quietly devastating performance from Shahanna Goswam. SANTOSH is the United Kingdom’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards®.
For more go to: santoshfilm.com
Screening at LA’s Laemmle Royal January 10 & 11 – Q&A after 7 PM screening w/ Sandhya Suri
Screening January 18 at NYC’s Metrograp.Theatre
About the filmmaker – SANDHYA SURI is a British-Indian writer and director based in London. Her feature documentary I For India premiered in the World Competition section of the Sundance Film Festival, garnering several international awards before being released theatrically to critical acclaim in the UK and the US. In 2017, the British Film Institute commissioned filmmaker Sandhya Suri to trawl through its national archive and direct a documentary drawn from films shot during colonial rule in India. The result was Around India With A Movie Camera, a fascinating and thought-provoking 72-minute chronicle of how the British viewed its empire, and how its subjects returned the gaze. Her first fiction short The Field was produced by Thomes Bidegain and Balthazar de Ganay, won Best International Short Film at TIFF in 2018, and was BAFTA- nominated for Best Short Film in 2019. In 2016 she was selected for both the Sundance Screenwriters’ and Directors’ Lab with her first fiction feature Santosh, which premiered in Un Certain Regard at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
SOCIAL MEDIA
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“Santosh reveals a world where right and wrong rarely exist in absolutes. Instead, the justice system operates in shades of gray, shaped as much by caste, religion, and gender as by evidence or law.” – Paul Emmanuel Enicola, The Movie Buff
“Writer/director Sandhya Suri – who has a documentary background – is keen to show that everyone plays their part in the prejudices and corruption of the legal system” – Amber Wilkinson, Eye for Film
“Caste and religion and class and gender are all part of this system, and that’s the broader critique in “Santosh,” which is quite furious by the end.” – Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times
“Such a unique take on the police-crime drama, one that introduces us to a brave and strong woman who finds herself having to work within a system that’s not ideal and is greatly biased against women and lower castes.” – Edward Douglas, The Weekend Warrior (Substack)
“Santosh’s brilliance is that it makes us feel culpable — it first has us feel persuaded by the easiness of prejudice, only to afterwards have us see that we have been beguiled.” – Alisha Mughal, Film Daze