Never before has the United Kingdom picked a Hindi-language film as its official entry for the Best International Feature Oscar. British-Indian documentarian Sandhya Suri’s narrative feature debut Santosh is not, however, the first subcontinental film to earn the distinction. Sarmad Masud’s Urdu film My Pure Land , “a modern-day feminist Western set in Pakistan”, was the U.
K.’s 2017 Oscar entry. But that obviously does not diminish the distance the Uttar Pradesh-set police thriller Santosh has travelled.
“I was really hoping we would be the U.K. entry, but as a filmmaker I prefer not to second-guess outcomes we have no control over,” Suri says.
“But did I do a huge fist pump and yelp with excitement!” Shahana Goswami, the film’s lead, learnt only the day before the announcement that the U.K. would be betting on Santosh .
It is a British production but India has the right to be proud of the film, she feels. “ Santosh is an Indian co-production made with an Indian cast and a partly Indian crew by an Indian-origin filmmaker telling an Indian story,” she notes, but is quick to add, “Appropriation is a tricky thing. I am not saying we can claim that Santosh is our film, but we can celebrate that a story set in India and involving talent in this country has travelled this far.
” For Goswami personally, Santosh is special. “The film,” she says, “is hugely shouldered by my character. I’ve always wanted to do more of this.
.. [Rubaiyat Hossain’s Ban.
