Slumdog Millionaire
Dreams can come true. Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-winning movie is about survival, destiny and dreaming big The film Slumdog Millionaire, which came out at the beginning of last year, has had big audiences in cinemas in many different countries. On 22nd February 2009 it won eight Oscars including ‘Best Film’, and for its English director Danny Boyle, ‘Best Director’.
The film tells the story of two brothers growing up in a very large slum in the biggest city in India, Mumbai. They are very poor and have no one to look after them after their mother is killed. The film starts quite close to the end of the story, where we see Jamal, the younger of the two brothers, in a Mumbai police station. He is about eighteen years old. We learn that the police have arrested him because he is taking part in the popular TV quiz show ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’, and some people think he is cheating. He has already given the right answers to lots of questions and now has the chance to win a huge amount of money. But where has someone from a slum (some of the characters in the film unkindly call him a ‘slumdog’), who has not had much of education got such knowledge from? The film then goes back in time and shows that Jamal knows the answers because of things that happened to him, his brother Salim and a girl called Latika in the past.
Bad things happen in the story and there is quite a lot of violence, but there is also, humour and most people would probably say it is a feel-good film. The ending is very exciting, but this isn’t the place to say what happens – you’ll have to go and see the film yourself!
One of the things that helps Slumdog Millionaire seem realistic is the fact that a few of the young actors are themselves from Mumbai slums. Television news programmes showed how happy the young actors were to be at the Oscars in Los Angeles, and how excited some people in Mumbai were when they arrived back home after the film did so well.