The streaming release of ‘Santosh’ in India has been temporarily halted
Exclusive: “It’s a real shame,” director Sandhya Suri concluded this afternoon when she sat down for a short discussion with Deadline after being named one of the winners of the BFI Award and the Chanel Filmmaker Prize 2025.
Suri, a veteran documentary filmmaker turned feature director, was clearly not referring to the award that comes with a cash prize of £20,000, but rather the news that the official Indian release of her feature film is set for 2024. Santosh It has been paused again.
Santosh It debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last year and was released in the US in December 2024. Vertigo released the film in the UK in March. The film, set in North India, did not get a theatrical release in India due to a censorship ban, but is set to premiere in India today, October 17, on Lionsgate Play. The streaming version was paused at the last minute.
“The process in India is that the censor board may ask you to make cuts for the theatrical release. The cuts they asked for were not acceptable to me or my team. We couldn’t make those cuts because it damaged the integrity of the film too significantly,” Suri said.
“The objections I had to cut for the theatrical release remain my objections to the streaming version. Streamers do not, by law, need to have censorship status to show films. But perhaps it has to do with an environment where streamers accept certain objections on their own for the sake of a harmonious world.”
Although it has not been officially released in India, Suri said she knows that people in the country are “100% watching the film” because of “the amount of feedback everyone is getting”. The director added that the news of the film’s debut being temporarily halted will unfortunately lead to an increase in piracy of the film in India.
“It was advertised and now we’re not advertising it, so more people will see it in another form,” she said. “My wish is that the film will be distributed legitimately and uncut in India.”
Santosh It debuted in Un Certain Regard in Cannes in 2024 and was submitted as the UK entry in the Best International Film category at the 97th Academy Awards. The film follows newly widowed Santosh, who inherits her late husband’s job as a police constable, and gets involved in the investigation of the murder of a young girl.
The film was produced by Good Chaos, with co-producers Razor Film and Haut et Court, and was financed by the BFI and BBC Film.
Next, Suri will direct an adaptation of JG Ballard’s unnamed novel from a screenplay she is currently writing. Suri declined to say which Ballard novel she was dealing with, but described it as “Ballard filled with a lot of emotions.”