There is no escaping film censorship in India – 'Santosh' is only the latest example

British filmmaker Sandhya Suri’s acclaimed drama Santosh was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024 and chosen to represent the United Kingdom in the Best International Feature Film category later that year. Set in an unidentified North Indian town and starring Shahana Goswami in the lead role, Santosh has travelled widely – except to the country in which it is set, and which it powerfully examines.

Santosh was to be streamed on Lionsgate Play on October 15. The release has now been indefinitely stalled. “It was announced and now we’re un-announcing, so a lot more people are going to watch it in some other form,” Suri told the American trade publication Deadline.

A search on the streaming platform yields nothing. A similar search on Prime Video, which also hosts Lionsgate Play, leads to the 1989 melodrama of the same name.

This is the Hindi movie’s second run-in with censorship. Santosh was previously aiming for a theatrical release in India in March. But the Central Board of Film Certification demanded numerous cuts, which Suri refused to carry out, according to reports.

“Legal restrictions prevented her [Suri] sharing exact details of the censor’s demands, but she said that the list of cuts was so long it had gone on for several pages, and included...

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