Award-winning films 'Santosh' and 'Nasir' dropped from Chennai fest

CHENNAI: After the big-ticket 'L2:Empuraan' ran into one too many hurdles, which resulted in its makers making 'voluntary cuts' to assuage 'hurt sentiments', it was the turn of two critically acclaimed films to face censorship — 'Santosh' and 'Nasir'.

Sandhya Suri's acclaimed police procedural ‘Santosh’ was cancelled in the city on Sunday. ‘Santosh’, the UK’s official entry for the Oscars last year, was scheduled to be showcased as part of PA Ranjith’s Neelam Cultural Centre’s PK Rosy Film Festival at Prasad Digital Lab.

The organisers said that the screening could not take place as permission was denied by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which has reportedly blocked the film’s release in the country over concerns about its portrayal of the police force. Scores of film lovers who had turned up for the screening of one of the most-talked about titles last year were left disappointed with the news. John Abraham’s 1986 Malayalam leftist classic ‘Amma Ariyan’ (Report to Mother) was screened instead.

‘Santosh’ (2024), directed by British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri, follows the trials and tribulations of a young widow (Shahana Goswami) who takes on her husband’s police constable job following his death. Soon, she and her superior (Sunita Rajwar) get involved in a high-profile probe into the rape and murder of a Dalit teenager in a fictional town in north India.

In an interview with The Guardian, Sandhya Suri said the censor board had demanded several pages of cuts, which were “lengthy, wide-ranging, and radical,” and included concerns about police conduct. Although the filmmaker tried to find a solution, she said, “...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.”

‘Santosh,’ a Hindi-language co-production between the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, was set to release in India on January 10, with PVR Inox Pictures handling its distribution.

It premiered in the Un Certain Regard category at the Cannes Film Festival in May last year and was later screened at the Mumbai MAMI Film Festival and the Dharamshala International Film Festival in India.

A screening of another award-winning film, ‘Nasir’ (2020), was also dropped at the PK Rosy Film festival on Saturday morning, the organisers added. The film follows the story of an ordinary Muslim salesman set against the backdrop of the rising Hindutva tide in Coimbatore. It had premiered at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, where it won the NETPAC Award for the Best Asian Production. However, it was never released in India and is not available on any OTT platform — with no updates since it was initially slated to release on SonyLIV on May 6, 2022.

Directed by Arun Karthick, ‘Nasir’ is an Indo-Dutch co-production, funded by the Hubert Bals Fund and the Netherlands Film Fund. It is inspired by Dilip Kumar’s short story "A Clerk's Story".