UK selects PIO Sandhya Suri’s Santosh as official entry for Oscars 2025

Investigative crime thriller Santosh, shot in India’s Uttar Pradesh by British-Indian film director Sandhya Suri has been nominated by the British Academy as the UK’s submission to the Oscars in the international feature film category. This announcement comes two days after India selected Laapataa Ladies’ as its entry for the Academy Awards, which marks another Hindi film that has earned that honour but from another country.

The film, whose dialogues include Hindi, stars Shahana Goswami and Sunita Rajwar in the lead roles. It also premiered at the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival this year. The story is about rural Northern India’s newly widowed Santosh, who takes her late husband’s job as a police constable and becomes embroiled in the investigation of a female child’s murder.

Santosh is produced by British producers Mike Goodridge, James Bowsher, Balthazar de Ganay, and Alan McAlex. As per Deadline, Santosh was selected by BAFTA, the organisation appointed by the American Academy to choose the UK’s submission.

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BFI and BBC Film financed the movie. The feature film gained widespread acclaim in the UK. It has been selected as a non-English language film for the Best International Feature Film category at the Oscars.

The film will be competing with several other films around the world to make its chance at the final nomination. It will include five films and will be announced in January 2025 by the Academy.

(The article is published under a mutual content partnership arrangement betweenThe Free Press JournalandConnected to India)