Father's 'film letters' inspired director daughter

The director of the critically acclaimed crime thriller Santosh credits her father for sparking her passion for filmmaking. Sandhya Suri grew up in Darlington, where her late father, Dr Yash Pal Suri, worked as a consultant geriatrician for 20 years. When he was not caring for elderly patients, he was documenting life in a new country.

"He was a big movie fan," Suri says of her father.

"He wanted to be an actor but his dad wouldn't really let him - it was his dream that his son would be a doctor, so he became a doctor.

"But all the while he kept making films."

When Dr Suri came to England he wanted to stay in touch with family in India. Telegrams were expensive and the phone lines at the time were not reliable. So he bought two Super 8 cameras, two projectors, and two reel-to-reel audio recorders.

"He shipped one set back to India and kept one set here," Suri says.

"We basically made these film letters and sent them back and forth between England and India for 40 years."

Suri was part of that "filmmaking experience" and would set up the projector screen and watch her Indian family's films when they sent their responses.

"So it was always in our blood," she says. "Well, in his, and I inherited it."

Growing up in Darlington in the 1980s and 90s, Suri experienced life in a predominantly white town, which she says helped shape her creative perspective.

"There were maybe only three or four Asian kids at my school," she says.

"When you don't have your aunties, uncles and cousins around you like everyone else does, there's an intensity to that.

"There was also, of course, a sense of outsider status at the time, which makes you observe the world a little differently. You're always on the outside looking in."

Suri believes this is helpful for any artist and she found the experience fed her curiosity and "that observer instinct filmmakers tend to have".

Years later, Suri visits her family home, where her mother still lives, as often as she can.

"I have all these memories of hanging out with my friends here, walking back from school," she says.

"Now, when I come back with age, I use it more as a place to think about ideas, reflect on everything, and sometimes make ideas work, just by walking."

Inspired by her father's archive, Suri made the 2005 documentary I for India, using home movies and voice recordings to tell the story of her family's immigrant experience. Now, nearly two decades later, she has turned her attention to fiction.

Her debut feature, Santosh, is a Hindi-language drama set in Northern India, following a young woman who inherits her late husband's job as a police officer through a real-life government scheme.

"With every piece of work I do, I want to explore something different, both in terms of filmmaking and tone," Suri says.

She describes I for India as a "bittersweet, emotional, and nostalgic" film and her latest creation as an "uncompromising noir thriller".

"It deals with many things, but the key one for me was violence against women," she says.

"Not just in the Indian context, where the film is set, but as a global issue. As an artist, as a filmmaker, it's something I wanted to address in whatever way I could."

Suri and Santosh's producers, Balthazar de Ganay and James Bowsher, were nominated in the BAFTA outstanding debut category and won two British Independent Film Awards (BIFA). The film was the UK's entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars.

Now showing in UK cinemas, it marks a significant milestone for Suri, who spent a decade bringing it to life.

"I'm very, very excited because I'm bringing it home, and that means a huge amount," she says.

"All the awards are fantastic but, ultimately, it's all one step closer to more cinemas and more audiences."

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