Oscar-nominated Santosh’s release blocked for ‘negative portrayal’ of police

India's Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) has blocked the release in India of the UK's official entry to the Oscars, the film Santosh — over 'negative portrayal' of the police.

Santosh made its debut at the Cannes film festival to widespread acclaim. The film went on to be shortlisted for the Academy Awards, in fact, though it lost out to I'm Still Here from Brazil. (In contrast, India's Laapataa Ladies didn't make it to that top 15.)

Santosh also earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Debut Feature. Lead actress Shahana Goswami even won Best Actress at the Asian Film Awards for her role in the movie.

Written and directed by British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri, Santosh is set in north India and won international acclaim for its portrayal of a young widow who joins the police force and is assigned a murder investigation — of a young Dalit girl.

The film also grapples with the issue of sexual violence in India, particularly against lower-caste women, and the anti-Muslim rhetoric in the country, note reports in the Guardian.

When the filmmakers submitted the script for permission to film in India, they had faced no issues, however. So this gatekeeping certainly seems unexpected.

However, Indian audiences are unlikely to ever be able to see it in cinemas after the CBFC refused to allow the release of Santosh over concerns about its negative portrayal of the police.

Suri, the writer and director of Santosh, described the decision by the censors as “disappointing and heartbreaking”.

“It was surprising for all of us because I didn’t feel that these issues were particularly new to Indian cinema or hadn’t been raised before by other films,” she said.

Suri said the censors demanded a list radical cuts that were so lengthy and wide-ranging that they would be “impossible” to implement. Legal restrictions prevented her from sharing the censor board’s exact demands, but she did say the list went on for several pages.

It is concerned about themes relating to police conduct and wider societal problems which are the core themes of the film.

“It was very important to me that the film is released in India so I did try to figure out if there was a way to make it work,” said Suri. “But in the end it was just too difficult to make those cuts and have a film that still made sense, let alone stayed true to its vision.”

Suri emphasised that while the film offered an uncompromising depiction of the police, “I don’t feel my film glorifies violence in a way that many other films focusing on the police have done. There’s nothing sensationalist about it.”

This decision comes at a time when India’s socio-political atmosphere is the most right-wing, openly casteist, hypernationalistic and conservatively policed ever.

Meanwhile, the latest in Rohit Shetty's neverending ‘copaganda’ film series, Singham Again, has not just permission but endorsement, and draws parallels with the Ramayana!

On the other hand, comedian Kunal Kamra is under fire for calling Maharashtra deputy chief minister Eknath Shinde 'gaddaar [traitor]', mere days after the horrifying Nagpur violence incited by the movie Chhaava, portraying Mughal ruler Aurangzeb (and all Muslims by extension) as fanatical ideologues in a heavily communal and negative narrative. The ‘first look’ at a biopic on Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath was released today.

The 2012 case of a woman raped on a bus in Delhi, widely known as the Nirbhaya case, initially motivated Suri to make this film. She had collaborated with Indian non-government organisations while developing the storyline.

According to a 2020 Human Rights Watch report, police in India routinely use torture and flout arrest procedures with little or no accountability.

Similar depictions of police violence have previously appeared in the Indian film Jai Bhim, a 2021 movie based on the real-life story of a pregnant tribal woman whose husband, falsely accused of robbery, goes ‘missing’ from police custody.

But Suri suggested that perhaps the highly realistic depiction in Santosh — as opposed to the often stylised format of Bollywood and other Indian film industries — had caused discomfort among the censors.