‘Santosh’ trailer: Watch a new sneak peek at UK’s Oscars submission for Best International Feature
Metrograph Pictures has released a new trailer for “Santosh,” the United Kingdom’s 2025 Oscars submission for Best International Feature. The film written and directed by Sandhya Suri will open in select theaters on December 27. Watch the trailer above.
Ripped from her life of domesticity, Santosh (Shahana Goswami), a young widow now desperate to support herself, accepts an opportunity to inherit her husband’s job as a police officer in the rural badlands of India. Quickly taken under the wing of Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), a charismatic and commanding older female inspector, Santosh begins an investigation into a low-caste girl’s brutal murder that plunges her into a gritty world of crime and corruption, forcing her to confront not only the brokenness of the system around her, but her own place within it.
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As the film follows the title character’s first eye-opening days on the job, Santosh is confronted with rank corruption, absurd incompetence, raging prejudice, sneering male colleagues, and swirling moral questions. Then, her first major investigation—answering an impoverished father’s plea to find his missing teen daughter, a case no one seems to care about—throws her into an abyss. As clues unravel, so too does Santosh’s idea of who she might become in her new reality.
As the production moved through secluded villages, Suri blurred the lines between fiction and realism by casting non-actors, including the mother of the story’s victim. “She was a lady living in a really tiny room with her two kids. She came to see us filming and I found her really radiant and charismatic,” Suri said in a press release. “It was a pleasure to cast several characters from the local areas. The non-actors were fantastic for me to work with, and it became integral to the film’s approach.”
The UK has been nominated for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars three times, winning last year for Jonathan Glazer‘s “The Zone of Interest.” The country’s previous nominees were “Hed Wynn” (1993) and “Solomon & Gaenor” (1999).
Suri’s first fiction short, “The Field,” won Best International Short Film at TIFF in 2018, and was BAFTA-nominated for Best Short Film in 2019. In 2016, she was selected for both the Sundance Screenwriters’ and Directors’ Lab with her first fiction feature, “Santosh,” which premiered in Un Certain Regard at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
“Santosh” is produced by Mike Goodridge, James Bowsher, Balthazar de Ganay and Alan McAlex. Metrograph Pictures will open the film in select theaters on December 27, 2024.
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