“It’s a real shame,” filmmaker Sandhya Suri concluded this afternoon as she sat down for a brief discussion with Deadline after being named as one of the 2025 recipients of the BFI and Chanel’s Filmmaker Award.

Suri, a veteran documentary filmmaker turned fiction director, obviously wasn’t referring to the award, which comes with a £20,000 cash prize, but rather the news that the official Indian release of her 2024 feature Santosh has once again been paused.

Santosh debuted at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and was released in the U.S. in December 2024. Vertigo released the film in the UK in March. The film, which is set in Northern India , didn’t receive a theatrical release in India due to censorship blocks, but had been set for an Indian streaming debut today, October 17, via

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