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‘Santosh’ Writer-Director Sandhya Suri on the ‘Heat’ and ‘Straw Dogs’ Moments in Her Crime Drama Debut: ‘I Was Keen Not to Do Something Too Happy About Female Solidarity’
‘Santosh’ writer-director Sandhya Suri evokes comparisons to ‘Heat’ and ‘Straw Dogs’ in moments from her debut film, an India-set crime drama.
But for her debut narrative feature, which competed for the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes earlier this year before earning accolades at festivals like Camerimage, British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri drew directly from Indian law. As the eponymous fictional character (played by Shahana Goswami) investigates the murder of a young girl under the watch of a female superior officer (Sunita Rajwar) with inscrutable aims, what subsequently unfolds in the film is an extraordinary, unflinching portrait of one woman’s reckoning with personal relationships and a professional community in a larger sociopolitical culture historically controlled and dominated by men. The film never pauses to explicitly comment about the patriarchal society in which Santosh and Geeta operate, but when you’re writing a story like this, to what extent are the norms of the culture that’s surrounding this sort of a fait accompli?
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