Earlier this year, filmmaker Sandhya Suri’s police procedural Santosh missed its January release in Indian theatres after it ran into trouble with the Censor Board. It was announced last week that the film will be landing on OTT on October 17. In a new development, however, Santosh’s streaming release also seem to have been paused at the last minute.
As per a report in Deadline, Sandhya confirmed that the film will not be landing on Lionsgate Play as scheduled as she has the same objections for a streaming release as she had with the theatrical one.
“The process in India is that the censor board may ask you to make cuts for a theatrical release. The cuts they asked for were not acceptable to me or my team. We could not make those cuts as they compromised the integrity of the film too profoundly,” Sandhya said.
“The objections I had to cuts for the theatrical release remain my objections for a streaming release. The streamers don’t need, by law, to have censorship status to show films. But perhaps this is about an environment in which streamers take on certain objections of their own accord for a harmonious universe,” she added.
Sandhya also said that she knows people in the country are “100% watching” the film due to the “amount of feedback everyone is getting.” The filmmaker added that news of the film’s streaming debut being paused will sadly increase piracy of the film in India.
“It was announced and now we’re un-announcing, so a lot more people are going to watch it in some other form,” she said. “My wish is for the film to be distributed legitimately and uncut in India.”
Earlier, reports had stated that disagreements between the filmmakers and the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) over proposed edits delayed the release.
At the time, a CBFC member told PTI it was “a classic case of gross disagreement”, with the producers insisting on no cuts while the board sought certain modifications.
Sandhya, a British-Indian filmmaker, had told The Guardian newspaper in an interview that the censor board had demanded radical cuts so lengthy and wide-ranging that they would be impossible to implement.
Starring Shahana Goswami in the titular role alongside Sunita Rajwar of Panchayat fame, the Indo-British production had its world premiere at Cannes Films Festival in 2024 under the Un Certain Regard category and earned critical praise for its unflinching portrayal of caste, gender and power dynamics. The film was later chosen as the United Kingdom's official entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 2025 Oscars.
