What’s Indian about Santosh?

Never before has the United Kingdom picked a Hindi-language film as its official entry for the Best International Feature Oscar. British-Indian documentarian Sandhya Suri’s narrative feature debut Santosh is not, however, the first subcontinental film to earn the distinction.

Sarmad Masud’s Urdu film My Pure Land, “a modern-day feminist Western set in Pakistan”, was the U.K.’s 2017 Oscar entry. But that obviously does not diminish the distance the Uttar Pradesh-set police thriller Santosh has travelled. “I was really hoping we would be the U.K. entry, but as a filmmaker I prefer not to second-guess outcomes we have no control over,” Suri says. “But did I do a huge fist pump and yelp with excitement!”

Shahana Goswami, the film’s lead, learnt only the day before the announcement that the U.K. would be betting on Santosh. It is a British production but India has the right to be proud of the film, she feels. “Santosh is an Indian co-production made with an Indian cast and a partly Indian crew by an Indian-origin filmmaker telling an Indian story,” she notes, but is quick to add, “Appropriation is a tricky thing. I am not saying we can claim that Santosh is our film, but we can celebrate that a story set in India and involving talent in this country has travelled this far.”

For Goswami personally, Santosh is special. “The film,” she says, “is hugely shouldered by my character. I’ve always wanted to do more of this… [Rubaiyat Hossain’s Bangladeshi film] Under Construction was the last film that had me in every frame. It’s been 10 years since then.”

Head start at Cannes

Santosh has had a successful theatrical run in France after its Cannes premiere. As an Oscar entry, it can now hope for distribution in other markets, too. “We are lucky,” says Suri, “to have had a phenomenal run in France, nearing 150,000 entries and maintaining a solid position over two months at the box office.” She adds that it is important to her that the film is distributed in India and the U.K. “They are the two countries I am profoundly connected to. We have proved that Santosh plays well with audiences as a crossover film that operates within a genre.”

(L-R) Shahana Goswami, Sunita Rajwar and Sandhya Suri attend a Santosh photocall at the Cannes Film Festival
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Goswami is positive that Santosh will be distributed in India, if only on a streamer. “In today’s day and age, getting on to an OTT platform is appropriate for certain films that have a niche audience,” she says.

Santosh was always destined for big things, adds Sunita Rajwar, who plays the seasoned policewoman Goswami’s rookie constable looks up to after she gets her recently deceased husband’s job and is immediately flung into the deep end of an investigation into a young girl’s death.

Not an average police drama

“We knew all along that Santosh would not be an average police drama,” Rajwar continues. Suri, she reveals, auditioned Goswami and her twice, “once individually and then together to ascertain our chemistry”. “We spent 10-12 days with Sandhya to grasp the requirements of the characters. All three of us were together. It helped us understand each other. Sandhya was very clear about what she wanted.”

Suri, who is a regular visitor to India — “the visits are a little less frequent since I have a daughter now,” she says — was acutely aware of the need “to depict violence against women in a meaningful way”.

Her work process involves asking many questions. “Since I live outside, I am conscious of how I’m going to portray things. I ask myself questions, too many questions, which is why my films take as long as they do.”

Sunita Rajwar (left) and Shahana Goswami

Erasing boundaries

Santosh exemplifies the nature of global arthouse cinema today. In recent decades, these films have erased national boundaries. Santosh is a BBC Film production with Petit Chaos and Haut et Court of France, ZDF Arte and Razor Film Produktion of Germany, and India’s Suitable Pictures as partners.

As a multi-nation production, it will be competing with several other films of its ilk for an Oscar nomination. Poland’s entry Under the Volcano, about a holidaying Ukrainian family stranded in Tenerife due to the Russian invasion of their country, has, besides Ukrainian, Spanish, English, Russian, German and Wolof on the soundtrack.

Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, Canada’s entry, is a predominantly Persian film, France’s Emilio Perez, the Cannes Jury Prize winner directed by Jacques Audiard, is a Spanish-language film set in Mexico, Germany’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a Persian film directed by Iran’s Mohammad Rasoulof, and Switzerland’s Reinas was filmed in Peru in Spanish. The contender from Iceland, action director Baltasar Kormákur’s Touch, is in Icelandic, English and Japanese. Senegal has chosen Dahomey, Mati Diop’s Golden Bear-winning documentary. It is a Senegal-France-Benin co-production.

A still from Santosh

It is, therefore, no big deal that Santosh, lensed by Dutch cinematographer Lennert Hillege and edited by Paris-based Maxime Pozzi-Garcia, is going to the Oscars as U.K.’s entry. What perhaps is, is that the U.K.’s 2023 submission, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a German-Polish-Yiddish film loosely based on a Martin Amis novel, went all the way and won the Best International Feature Oscar, the first for a non-English British film.

That would be the act to follow, though a hard one indeed!

The writer is a New Delhi-based film critic.