The British Academy has selected Sandhya Suri’s acclaimed crime thriller “Santosh” as the U.K.’s submission to the Oscars‘ international feature film category.
The Hindi-language film, which bowed in the Un Certain Regard competition in Cannes earlier this year, enters the race perhaps carrying some added weight of pressure, with the U.K. having won the international feature Oscar earlier this year for the very first time with Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.”
The directorial feature debut of of British-Indian filmmaker Suri, best know for her documentaries “I for India” (2005) and “Around India with a Movie Camera” (2018), “Santosh” is set in rural northern India, where newly-widowed Santosh inherits her late husband’s job as a police constable. When an underage girl from one of India’s so-called “lower castes” is murdered, she is pulled into the investigation by a charismatic feminist inspector.
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Written and directed by Suri, “Santosh” stars Shahana Goswami in the lead role, alongside Sunita Rajwar. Behind the camera, the score was by Luisa Gerstein, cinematography by Lennert Hillege and editing by Maxime Pozzi-Garcia. The film was produced by James Bowsher, Balthazar de Ganay, Mike Goodridge, and Alan McAlex, while executive producers were Ama Ampadu, Martin Gerhard, Lucia Haslauer, Diarmid Scrimshaw, and Eva Yates. It was co-financed by Good Chaos, Razor Film Produktion, Haut et Court, BBC Film, and BFI.
In Variety‘s review, “Santosh” was described as “whip smart” and a film that was committed “to capturing the ugly allure of power through the perspective of those who wield it.”
The film will be released in the U.S. by Metrograph Pictures in the U.S.
Prior to winning with “The Zone of Interest” the U.K. had limited success in Academy Awards‘ best international film category — and its previous title best foreign language film — landing just two nominations (for Welsh-language titles “Hedd Wyn” in 1993 and “Solomon & Gaenor” in 1999) from 20 submissions.
