'Santosh' selected as UK's Oscar entry

London-based filmmaker Sandhya Suri's Uttar Pradesh-set police thriller "Santosh", which premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, was on Wednesday named as Britain's Oscar entry in the international feature category. "Santosh", which includes Hindi dialogues, revolves around a newly widowed housewife as she inherits her late husband's job as a police constable and becomes embroiled in the investigation of a young girl's murder.

"BAFTA is pleased to confirm that Sandhya Suri's film 'Santosh' is the UK selection for next year's Oscars' International Feature Film Award," the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) said in a statement. Members of BAFTA's Selection Committee select the UK's entry to be submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) for the best international film category, which won Britain this year's Oscar with "The Zone of Interest". "Santosh", which is also in contention for the First Film Competition Sutherland Award at this year's BFI London Film Festival (LFF) starting next month, has been hailed as a "deft thriller" and complex character study of a female cop, played by Shahana Goswami, whose moral conflict intertwines several themes of class, caste and intolerance.

"I'm not really somebody who wants to make a film because they want to teach somebody anything. I don't have a particular campaign or things that I must tick off. So, I don't like didactic films. But what was interesting to me was the idea of a type of place," Suri told PTI in an interview. "A type of place where these things are just in the DNA of the place. It was about the type of place where this misogyny, this casteism, religious intolerance, it's just all sort of hanging in the air.

It is just what that place is it's more an observation than a pushing through of messages, that these things can casually exist in society and to sort of hold a mirror up to that and to ask the question: if we put somebody like Santosh, who was a housewife, in a place like that, how does she process all that," she said.