In her debut Santosh, filmmaker Sandhya Suri tells the story of a young wife who becomes a widow when her husband, a policeman, is killed at work. As part of a government-sponsored initiative, she “inherits” his job in a male dominated police station in rural northern India.

While investigating the murder of a teenage girl from a poor family, the policewoman faces resistance. Torn between her sense of justice on the one hand and her ambition to assert herself in a patriarchal professional environment on the other, she becomes increasingly entangled in the abysses of a deeply corrupted male society. Her experienced superior, the charismatic inspector Sharma, has her own methods of navigating this flawed system. In their dissimilarity, the two women fight alone, but are nevertheless united by a sense of deep solidarity. (ML)