'Santosh' Director Sandhya Suri's Father Inspired Her Passion For Filmmaking

Sandhya Suri's crime thriller, Santosh, has earned acclaim in the global film circuit. The Hindi-language film traces the journey of a young widow who takes on her deceased husband's role as a police officer and investigates a murder. The film stars Shahana Goswami and Sunita Rajwar, among others. Santosh premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard category. Notably, it is a feature film debut for director Suri, a prominent British-Indian filmmaker known for her award-winning documentaries and short films like I for India and The Field. 

Who Is Sandhya Suri? Mathematician-Turned-Filmmaker

Sandhya Suri is a documentarian who made her feature film debut directing Santosh. She was born to Indian immigrants in England and grew up in Darlington. Suri initially pursued a degree in mathematics and worked as a teacher in Japan before finding her calling in films.

Suri recently told BBC in an interview that she wanted to fulfill her father's wish of being a filmmaker. Yash Pal Suri worked as a consultant geriatrician for 20 years. When he was not caring for elderly patients, he was documenting his life as a South Asian immigrant in the UK.

Her father would send these films to his family back in India. Sandhya Suri told the outlet, "He was a big movie fan. He wanted to be an actor, but his dad wouldn't really let him - it was his dream that his son would be a doctor, so he became a doctor. But all the while, he kept making films."

"So it was always in our blood... "Well, in his, and I inherited it," Suri shared.

Suri studied documentary filmmaking at the National Film and Television School. Her first documentary, I for India (2005), traced her father's experiences as an Indian immigrant in the UK. The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.

In 2018, Suri released the narrative short film The Field, about a woman farmer in Haryana and her clandestine love affair. The film won Best International Short Film at the Toronto Film Festival 2018 and Best Fiction Short Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2019.

Suri began filming Santosh in 2016 in and around Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. The filmmaker and single mom told The Upcoming about the challenges of working continents apart from her daughter and in a lesser-familiar location. She called the experience a "very steep learning curve."

What Inspired Santosh?

Speaking to the UK media outlet The Upcoming, Suri shared that Santosh's idea was born "quite organically." She recalled a photograph she saw of a female police officer investigating the 2012 Delhi gang rape case, which eventually inspired the character Santosh.

"A photo came out of a very angry crowd in Delhi and a female police officer in front of them... I got hooked on her. I just thought, 'She has the power, but she doesn't have the power. She's the,m but she's not them. She feels their pain, yet, she maybe doesn't.' I was intrigued and thought that's through whom I tell the story and dissect the violence [against women]," Suri described.