In this photograph there was a line of female police officers standing against a crowd of ferociously angry women.
There was one police officer, and she has this amazing expression on her face, really enigmatic.
Who is that woman, what is she thinking?
‘Santosh’ and Director Sandhya SuriMK2 Films/Baz Bamigboye
She has a police uniform that holds so much power especially in India, she wondered.
What was it like to be her?
Metrograph release the film in U.S. theaters on December 27.
Shahana Goswami at the Deadline Portrait Studio during the 77th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France.Michael Buckner for Deadline
Its out in the U.K. on March 21 with Vertigo Releasing and Civic Studios.
The new post gives Saini room to breathe.
I never wanted to make a police film, Suri explains.
But when I saw that photograph of the police woman, I thought: Thatll be my way in.
Im like, wow, thats a status.
The film is more than a police procedural, however.
The cop aspect underpins something deeper.
The investigation Santosh launches becomes mired in gender and class prejudice and corruption.
I think for me its more about having females who are making morally complex choices, Suri notes.
I think thats whats missing [from other films].
I think we have a lot of females in films.
We also have quite a few leads in films sometimes.
But for me, I was really interested in complex moral decisions that a woman has to make.
Her debut feature documentaryI For Indiapremiered in the World Competition section of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.
After departing Oxfam, she resumed documentary filmmaking.
And thats what I did, she says smiling.
Suri was selected to join the program in 2016.
Suri was also able to travel to India to thoroughly explore her topic.
Suri knew that moving from documentary to narrative feature filmmaking was going to be a gear shift.
And then even at the end, its not really about who done it.
Its a very complex film to give a shot to make work in India and in the UK.
Theres a lot in there culturally.
So thats what I give a shot to do onSantosh.
Suri says there were two ways she could have castSantoshs lead character.
I could easily have cast her as a naive housewife who gets thrown into this situation.
Maybe it was a more boring version of who she could be.
In one of the last days of casting, her casting director suggested she meet with Shahana Goswami.
I like the idea that maybe she was more corrupt than her husband.
And I met many women who had come in on the government scheme.
Some of them had never even left their homes before their husband died.
Sunita Rajwar (Gullah, Panchayat), playing Santoshs superior, has turned in a superbly wrenching performance.
The film is produced by Mike Goodridge, James Bowsher, Balthazar de Ganay, and Alan McAlex.
Executive producers are Ama Ampadu, Eva Yates, Diarmid Scrimshaw, Lucia Haslauer, and Martin Gerhard.
Ballard novella that Im doing an adaptation of, she says, declining to reveal its title.
However, Suri allowed that its a dystopian love story.
