Oscars 2025 will see two films made by Indian woman
Directors and both are set in Hindi
heartland of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh compete for Best Foreign Feature
Film.. This happened after Britain has
submitted a film directed by an Indian woman and with actors from our country as the
official entry to Foreign Language Category of the Oscars. Why is this
important to India ? At the Oscars 2024,
it was the UK's entry, Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, that won Best
International Feature Film. Will it happen again ? India submitted Laapataa Ladies as Oscar entry.
lThis film Santosh that was UK entry was like Payal
Kapadia a film premiered at Cannes but in the Un Certain Regard section. It did
not get any award like Kapadia film. In that section the film Konstantin
Bojanov's The Shameless, won the Best Actress award for Anasuya Sengupta .
Santosh did not have to come to FFI to get an Oscar
entry as it fulfilled all the criteria for submission and that includes theatre
screenings in UK. The
British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) played a crucial role in
selecting ‘Santosh’ for this honor. As the organization responsible for
choosing the UK’s Oscar submissions, BAFTA evaluates films based on various
criteria.
"Santosh", which includes Hindi dialogues, revolves around a newly
widowed housewife as she inherits her late husband's job as a police constable
and becomes embroiled in the investigation of a young girl's murder. The Indianness
of Lapaaraa Ladies was about the veil worn by ladies according to FFI President , very unique to India and
the official statement saying it shows Indian woman can be a rebel and not, a
choice that no woman in the world has.
Suri who
hails from UP and lives in London tells about the film - "A type of place
where these things are just in the DNA of the place. It was about the type of
place where this misogyny, this casteism, religious intolerance, it's just all
sort of hanging in the air. It is just what that place is it's more an observation
than a pushing through of messages, that these things can casually exist in
society and to sort of hold a mirror up to that and to ask the question: if we
put somebody like Santosh, who was a housewife, in a place like that, how does
she process all that,"
