During this year’s London Film Festival I found myself drawn to a wide range of films, genres and subject matters, but with my inherent interest in female filmmakers and debut features, Santosh from writer/director Sandhya Suri was a screening I had my eye on from the very beginning and it did not disappoint. Suri, whose background is in documentary filmmaking, wanted to talk about the extreme and unrelenting violence against women in India but, unable to accurately and authentically portray this in the doc format, shifted tack into a nuanced and captivating fictional exploration of female identity and agency in a world and country where neither of those concepts are simple. A film 10 years in the making, Santosh houses a complex female narrative, bites of a crime thriller, challenges simplistic portrayals of Indian women in a variety of roles and showcases an India not commonly portrayed on screen. Suri resists easy resolutions, instead by depicting a thought-provoking glimpse into one woman’s interior world, she shines a small light on some of the societal forces that shape her experiences. An impressive feature debut which secured slots on BIFA’s Best Debut Screenwriter and Breakthrough Producer longlists earlier this week, I was able to catch some time with Suri at LFF and speak to her about the image which immediately became the lightbulb moment for the film, setting the story within a small densely woven society in rural India and making sure she had completed the necessary level of research in order to authentically tell this story.
My first question would have to be, how have you found people’s reactions to the film at LFF?
We’ve just had one screening so far and the reception was really warm. I don’t know if people know exactly what to do with that film straight after the screening and it was my first Q&A. It’s a dense film.
You come from a documentary background and this is your directorial feature debut. What made you want to make the move into narrative?
I had no particular desire to make the move into narrative. It’s just the way the story turned out to have to be told. I wanted to make something about violence against women and I was researching that and couldn’t find a way in through documentary – I wasn’t able to depict what I wanted. I was finding it hard to find the level of understanding from the inside, a sort of dissection of violence that I wanted to do with the film. Then as I was covering a particular gang rape case in Delhi, which was so horrific, and although I’d already been mulling this over for a long time in documentary form, I saw an image in the press which sparked the film. It was a policewoman facing female protesters with a very enigmatic expression on her face. I just looked at her and I thought, okay, she’s the way in to discuss violence. Violence that the police can exert on a crowd and people, the fear of their violence and also the violence that she experiences as a woman, her being them, but not being them. I just found her so interesting. Then because it’s a police film, that’s obviously not going to work out as a documentary in India so now I have to make a fiction and I’m in a genre.
I was finding it hard to find the level of understanding from the inside, a sort of dissection of violence that I wanted to do with the film.
I was captivated by Shahana Goswami in the lead role and I loved those tiny little enigmatic smiles. How did you come to cast her and develop that role?
She’s so brilliant in it. I cast her actually quite late in the process because she was a bit out of my age bracket but my casting director had seen her in a film called Zwigato. What I like about Shahana is that she can play quite ballsy women but she also has this utter sweetness, particularly in her smile. She has a beautiful body to wear a uniform – I find her iconic in that uniform. I feel a woman of passion and love, even though we don’t see her relationship we feel the love, and she’s got an ability to have that restraint, that grief that she holds within her which doesn’t come out. Overall, I felt she had all of that edginess to her, which was always what I had written for Santosh. She was always slightly ambitious, even as a housewife, slightly hungry.
The moment she is sitting having a chai and she watches that first corrupt interaction with the police you can just see it all playing out on her face.
It’s great when she gets that bribe. I remember a lot of discussions at screenings, people being a bit anxious and worrying will that affect our sympathy towards her? She’s smiling as she’s getting a bribe but of course she’s smiling. This is what it is, this is the job and the perk of the job, to give it back wouldn’t be realistic.
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The film is also so full of these stunning shots of India and the countryside there, were those influenced by your documentary filming?
Well, it was always about this type of place. It was never about fitting all these themes into this film and just ramming them in. It was about setting a story, which is simple enough, in a densely woven tapestry of a society in a certain place. So it was always about a shitty little town, I always wanted to set it there. I love shitty little towns, I could spend a lot of time in them and I’m always drawn to them anywhere I go in the world. She gets sent to this type of place and then obviously I needed to show that type of place so people have a feel of it, especially because we don’t necessarily see them that much. We see a lot of cities in India and a lot of different landscapes and I wanted to make sure that there was space in the film just to allow the feel of that place.
It was about setting a story, which is simple enough, in a densely woven tapestry of a society in a certain place.
And then what about cameras, what were you using going down those rough tracks, hard terrain and not easily accessible locations?
We shot on an Alexa. Depending on the situation, we would deal with light accordingly. We were always trying to be as light as possible as we were in and out of places quickly when we were shooting in live locations. Then when we had a bit more time and control such as the interrogation scene we had very little light so we were working very minimally. Then on other occasions where we had time to set up and a bit more control, then a bit more gear would come out.
This is a Hindi film, produced by Good Chaos and financed by BBC and the BFI, which is amazing. How did that all come together?
Well, it’s funded by them and also financed from France a little bit, the Cinema du Monde and Germany – Arte. It was a co-production but with the majority financed from the UK. I’m very lucky I just had so much support from BBC Film and the BFI who just really liked the script and thought it was a strong script. What’s been so important about LFF is being able to bring it home. We premiered at Cannes and one might think it’s an Indian film if one didn’t know but to bring this home as a British film is really important. Also, if you’re making a film about the police in India, you can’t ignore the legacy of what that police is and where those structures come from. So yeah, not just from me as a British director and a writer, in many forms it is a British film.
I was interested in having the dark and light of that relationship in there and that’s why I chose female police to look at the violence on both sides.
You’re a female filmmaker making a film about violence against women and the complex relationships between women.
I just always want to look at the complexity of things. I never wanted a mentor-mentee relationship which was just solidarity between women because it’s more complex than that, especially in that type of environment. I was interested in having the dark and light of that relationship in there and that’s why I chose female police to look at the violence on both sides. I just thought it was more interesting than only the crime itself.
Did you have to get inside the police for research purposes?
I did a lot. Journalists can never fully reveal their sources but that’s why the film took so long to get made because I needed to have extensive research done before I felt comfortable to shoot.
So how long was the creation of this film from conception to completion?
Ten years, but honestly, I have no idea why it took so long. There wasn’t that much writing, there were a few drafts of the script but It wasn’t in endless development. There was COVID, then my father passed away and there were family things going on. But I was mainly working on proper access so that I felt I was ready to make the film with confidence. I wanted to have done the research to the level I wanted, I needed to get the details right.
Was there any pushback as a British director going over to India and shooting this particular story?
No, the script was cleared by the government because you can’t shoot in India if you are a foreign crew without certain permissions. Even though there are only two foreigners in the crew we couldn’t really shoot as a foreign production without clearance from the government. I think that for me, it was more about making sure that I felt confident against potential criticism because I had done so much research. Which is also why I needed to really secure myself in my groundwork, basically.
I can imagine that level of research was quite traumatic.
I come from documentary and I also ran the film department at Oxfam for four years so I travelled the world looking at quite traumatic things quite a lot. You’re in more of a bearing witness mode sometimes.
What’s next for you after this epic 10-year journey?
Well, maybe something a bit lighter. I’ve optioned with the help of BBC Film, a novella from J.G. Ballard. So I am working on this sort of dystopian love story, which is very exciting and different.