Interview with “Santosh” Director Sandhya Suri

Director Sandhya Suri premiered her debut narrative feature, Santosh, at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. I reviewed it at the Toronto International Film Festival, in September. As I wrote in that review, “The titular lead character [Shahana Goswami, Zwigato] is a woman forced to navigate the patriarchal demands of the workplace after her husband, a constable, is killed during a riot.” She encounters deep misogyny within the ranks, as well as anti-Muslim prejudice directed at the ostensible perpetrator of a heinous sex crime.

Before long, she comes under the tutelage and protection of a veteran female officer, Sharma (Sunita Rajwar, The Conversion). Ultimately, however, Sharma may not be all that different in world view from the men in the department. Santosh therefore has to figure out what her true values are and what she should do in the face of official corruption, even as she herself participates in morally dubious actions.

The film comes out in the United States on December 27. I had the chance to speak with Suri last week via Zoom. Here is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed: Prior to making this film, you made two documentaries and a short. What made you want to tackle the themes you tackle here in a fiction feature rather than another documentary?

Sandhya Suri: Well, I tried to make a documentary that was the starting point for this film. I was actually in India working with NGOs, trying to find a way to talk about violence against women. And I was seeing pretty horrible things daily and I just felt that holding the camera up to them wasn’t bringing me the understanding that I was looking for. I was trying to somehow get inside of the violence or bring some understanding to it, and it didn’t feel that that was going to work in the documentary form or the way I was approaching the doc. So that’s why I left that project.

And then later I got inspired by a photograph following the horrific 2012 gang-rape case in the bus in Delhi. And I saw a photograph of female protestors and they were standing up to a female police constable who just had such an interesting expression on her face. I thought, “OK, great. That’s how I tell the story. I tell it through her. She’s one of them, but she’s both powerless and very powerful, in some respects. What is her view on all of this? Where does she sit? What’s her morality?” And then obviously you know that you’re not going to make a documentary about the Indian police, so the decisions sort of make themselves, basically.

CLR: I can imagine that that would be difficult. So, I like this duality of her having power but also being powerless. And in fact your film really provides no easy answers, no clear morality of black and white, good and bad. Everyone is compromised in some way. Did you ever consider having one character who perhaps remained clean throughout, or making your main character be that way? Was there ever a version of the script like that?

SS: There are a lot of films about the good cop and the bad system. That’s like a staple of cinema. It’s a big staple of Indian cinema. The system is rotten, but there’s always one person who’s going to take it on, maybe in a slightly too vigilante mode, but for the good, for the better. And I just wasn’t interested in that. I was more interested in a morally murky universe, putting my character in there from a very sheltered place and seeing where her particular gray is going to be. What gray is she going to choose? And investigating the question of, well, if she does cross a line, how does one come back from crossing that line? And how do you restore yourself?

CLR: And your ending shows how she does restore herself. So there’s that. Both women who play the leads, Santosh and Shama, are really quite good in their respective roles. How did you cast Shahana Goswami and Sunita Rajwar in the parts?

SS: Well, everyone auditioned. I really needed to see people in the room. So I cast Shahana very late in the process because I had thought that she might be outside of my age range for Santosh. But then on the last day of casting, my casting director said, “Let’s bring her in. I saw her last night at a screening of a film, and she just has that really interesting mix of hardness and sweetness that feels so right for Santosh.” And she came in absolutely correctly: she had poise, she had restraint. I felt that she could hold the grief that she has within her throughout the film until it releases in some form or another. I felt her love for her husband. I felt she was able to hold so many things at the same time and I could sort of feel them all when she was in the room.

She wasn’t an obvious choice of just an innocent woman who gets thrust into the police, who’s a housewife and doesn’t know anything. The Santosh I wrote always had a lot of ambition and hunger somehow, from its own little kingdom of her life beforehand. And Shahana had all of that. And then Sunita, I did a chemistry test between them and it really worked. And I thought they were both perfect for underpinning this idea of the matriarch.

CLR: I haven’t seen either actress before, but from what I read in the press notes I understand that Sunita Rajwar is normally a comic actress. So what was this like for her? This is not a comic part.

SS: No, I mean it was interesting in terms of just pitch, as well, because a bit into the film she asked, “Is that too much?” And I said, “Yes, yes!” And she went, “Oh, you’re right. It’s too much.” She’s a great actress; she trained at the National School of Drama. She has great craft, but she’d been working in a very different space for a while. So it was about bringing it down to the lightest touch. And she is actually a very positive and jolly person, as well. So I would have to keep dragging her back down to the dark side when I bought her there. She was happy to stay there for a while, but I think it was just a really, really interesting experience.

CLR: Am I wrong in sensing that there is an almost romantic interest that Sharma has for the younger Santosh? I was always questioning what exactly she wanted from Santosh beyond just mentoring a younger person, but it remains largely in the subtext. Was I misreading some of that or was that there in the script?

SS: No, it’s definitely there. I don’t know how I would label that or if she would label it in any way. For me, it was about giving some depth to what Sharma does for Santosh. It’s not pure altruism. It comes from something deeper, which may surprise Sharma. And I felt that to make her fully human, her strength of feeling needed to almost surprise her. So there is definitely a depth of feeling. That doesn’t mean there’s not manipulation; it doesn’t mean there’s not a darker side or there’s not something else going on at the same time regarding how Santosh may be instrumentalized within all of this. But that doesn’t mean that that doesn’t exist.

CLR: I did find it interesting that she takes the blame at the end on herself rather than spreading any of it to Santosh. That’s an interesting character note. So, this is your first time making a fiction feature. Did you have any particular production challenges? You were shooting in India and you’re taking on, among other subjects, Hindu-Muslim relationships. Thanks to Narendra Modi’s BJP party, that’s an increasingly fraught topic in India.

SS: It was a very, very tough shoot. We had full government permission to shoot, so the script was passed by the ministry, which was great news. I was a little worried at one moment, but that all went through perfectly. So we shot what was in the script. There was no intervention or anything like that that was problematic. We are now looking to distribute in India and that has its own process; I’m waiting to see what happens there.

I knew I was throwing myself in at the deep end with this film because there are over 76 speaking parts, there are stunts there, big actions, crowd sequences, things that people might avoid on a first film. But I had very experienced teams around me and it was very, very hot and locations got flooded and that was … OK! It was just a rollercoaster. It’s all about finding out. I think what I learned was that I have quite a lot of stamina and am more resilient than I thought to get through all of that.

CLR: In the production notes, you mention how you wanted to have your film comment on some of the police overreach that one sees in Bollywood films. I’m no connoisseur of Bollywood, but how is that corruption—or the taking of the law into their own hands—different from other cinemas, do you think? In my native United States, cops pretty much do what they want in Hollywood films and American TV, for instance. And it’s good, right? Let’s break the law for the sake of the law. So how is it different, if at all, in the Bollywood tradition?

SS: I don’t know if it’s different, but it is generally the narrative, and there can be some quite extreme things done in the name of the greater good with the understanding that the system is rotten. But you are right; that is by no means only an Indian narrative. It was just that I felt that things are more complicated than that. That’s all I wanted to show, that things are more complicated and there’s such a funny, interesting relationship between Bollywood and the police and how they’re represented. There are so many representations of the police in Bollywood that I was just looking for a different feeling to that representation.

CLR: So, you’re getting ready to release the film. It’s coming out here in the United States on December 27. Are you already pivoting to your next project?

SS: I am because it keeps you sane in awards season if you are writing or making something. So I have a project: it’s a dystopian story that I am writing at the minute, so I keep trying to carve out time to do it.

CLR: Thank you so much for chatting with me and for making the film. I wish you all good things with it.

SS: Thank you so much!

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.