Sandhya Suri is a British-Indian film director and documentarian.^[1]

Early life

Sandhya Suri was born in England and raised in Darlington.^[2] Her father, Yash Pal Suri, had emigrated from India to work at a hospital in Teesside.^[3]

Career

After earning a degree in mathematics, Suri worked as a teacher in Japan. Her experiences documenting this period on camera inspired her to study documentary filmmaking at the National Film and Television School.^[1][2]

In 2005, Suri's released the documentary I for India detailing her father's experiences as an 20th-century Indian immigrant in the United Kingdom based on his own tape recordings.^[3] I for India was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.^[4]

Suri's second film, the silent 2018 documentary Around India with a Movie Camera, used archival British Film Institute footage to explore life in British India.^[5] That same year, Suri released the narrative short film The Field,^[6] which was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Short Film in 2019.^[2]

Suri's narrative feature debut, Santosh was selected to screen in the Un Certain Regard portion of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.^[7] She first began work on Santosh in 2016 when she was accepted to the Sundance Institute Director's Lab.^[1]

Filmography

Awards and nominations