By most standards, Sandhya Suri’s fiction feature debut “Santosh” is already a hit. After premiering in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar, the Hindi-language crime thriller about a widow who inherits her late husband’s police officer job in rural India has gone on to win the Golden Frog for debut director in Camerimage, land a European Film Award nomination and win two British Independent Film Awards. In France, the film had a successful box office run over the summer, with more than 150,000 admissions to date. It’s now the U.K.’s submission for the Oscars’ international film category – following in the triumphant footsteps of “The Zone of Interest” – and recently made the shortlist.

And yet “Santosh” achieved almost all of this without having a U.K. distributor lined up, sales agent Mk2 and its producers having spent months struggling to find a suitable partner.

Indeed, there was eleventh...