सलाम बॉम्बे

The boy Krishna (Shafiq Syed) is abandoned by his mother at the Apollo Circus and she tells him that he can only return home when he can afford 500 rupees to pay for the bicycle of his brother that he had trashed. Krishna is left behind by the circus and he takes a train to Bombay.

Krishna is called Chaipau by the street children of Bombay and he works delivering and selling tea for Chacha (Irshad Hashmi), who owns a street bar. Krishna befriends the heroin addicted Chillum (Raghubir Yadav) that sells drugs for the drug dealer and caftan Baba Golub (Nana Patekar), and the girl Manju Golub (Hansa Vithal), who is the daughter of Baba with the prostitute Rekha Golub (Aneeta Kanwar). Krishna dreams on saving 500 rupees to return home, but the life on the streets of Bombay is not easy.

"Salaam Bombay!" is the first feature by the Indian director Mira Nair, who became famous in Brazil with the also excellent "Monsoon Wedding". The heartbreaking story follows the saga and the lost of the innocence of the boy Krishna on the streets of Bombay and is very similar to the one of Pedro ("Los Olvidados" - 1950) on the streets of Mexico City; or Pixote ("Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco" – 1981) on the streets of São Paulo; or the anonymous street kids ("Ali Zaoua, Prince de la Rue" – 2000) on the streets of Casablanca. The documentary style is impressive but easy to understand based on the previous career of Mira Nair.

The problem with abandoned children of Third World countries is a sad reality along decades and shameful governments usually transfer the money that could solve or at least improve this social problem to corruption. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): Not Available

A brilliant but sad film in which we follow abandoned Krishna on his quest to make enough money to return to his village. Along the way we meet the street kids, prostitutes, pimps and dealers he shares everyday life with.

An amazing aspect is that all the child actors in the film are real street kids picked after attending workshops run by Nair and friends. In particular the central performances of Krishna, Manju and Coalpiece (his songs!) are superb. Despite their hardships there are some great moments when you see glimpses of the playful kids within.

The film never wanders into over-sentimentality and at times its hard to believe you're not watching a documentary. Hindi-film music and escapism seeps into everyday life, actors mingle with ordinary people and the whole film is shot in real locations around Mumbai that just drip with atmosphere. This sadly includes the chiller room which was filmed as they found it along with the soul-crushing 'Flowers that never bloom' prayer.

The story wanders and can be slow but this only serves to draw you into their world and leave you sad and angry at the end - at the loss of childhood for these kids and countless others. Still relevant today.

i have been late in watching it, but after watching it u feel that you can never be late in watching such a movie. The movie is excellent. Perhaps Mira Nair's best. I was particularly moved by the story and the picturization. you see the striking poverty and its madness, but Mira has been brilliant to show life in it. a lost boy in a big city with a dream to get back home, keeps himself in control, while everything around him is so much polluted with drugs, and prostitution. Poverty is never neat, in the movie also it is validly not shown as such. But the innocence and strength of children, and them growing up in such conditions, makes them more enduring than adults. to say the least the movie is all about life. it is there to show that no matter how hard it is, life exists in slums, in poverty, and people are living it. the movie is a collectors item. one of the best about India - from India...watch it. Salaam Bombay.

Came across this film on a Public channel last night, by mistake... or should I say, by luck! Amazing film, so many layers deep, it got me thinking. I've been a fan of Mira's work since "Mississippi Masala", but had never heard of Salaam Bombay. She demonstrates in this fine film a sense of lighting and composition that's nothing short then breathtaking. The locations were rich as the characters, the acting was touching and sincere... this is a film I won't forget.

This is one of the single most powerful films I've ever seen. Having been to India several times and knowing to an extent what it's like for the poor kids that have to make it on the streets, it really gets to me. I know that it received quite a bit of critical acclaim when it came out, but I didn't discover it until recently, and, judging from the number of votes that its gotten on this site, it doesn't seem as though too many people have seen it. I hope more people do; these kids don't have much of a voice in their own country, let alone the rest of the world, but movies like this give them one and it should be heard by everyone.