Slumdog Millionaire, Bollywood and Media Images

MUMBAI, India -- The splashy acclaim over Slumdog Millionaire's Academy Award success is well-earned and long overdue. More power to the filmmakers and performers, and to Celador Films here and Fox Searchlight here for bringing the movie to Western audiences. On the streets of Mumbai, of course, some praised Slumdog, while others panned it for showing the dark side of India's economic boom. One Indian businessman I spoke to said the film imposed the American Dream on a Mumbai slum that no American could imagine living in. "It's not the real India, it's Hollywood," he said, chuckling. My wife and I recently saw the movie at a suburban multiplex, and the 80% white audience cheered loudly at the end, sitting through the credits and Bollywood-style music video. Nearby, older Indian uncles and aunties wiped their eyes and smiled proudly -- surely in part because Slumdog is one of the rare, respectable feature films on India shown widely in the West in English (besides Mira Nair's The Namesake, Mississippi Masala and Salaam, Bombay) here that didn't embarass them. Despite the backlash in India, good job, Slumdog people. This Los Angeles Times story shows how the film made it to the U.S. here Luckily, a small wave of India-related films is rolling westward.

 

The film and media industries have made much progress in their portrayals of non-white and non-Western themes and subjects from a generation or two ago, when cultural colonialism ruled, and when minority and Third World stereotypes were common in movies, marketing and TV shows. At best, the old portrayals were minor offenses that made non-white viewers cringe. At worst, they illustrated the deep-seated bias, business style and world view of the media elite. Times have changed. In the new century, the color green trumps all other shades. And "cross-cultural" filmmaking, a fusion of movie-making styles, is gaining more backing in Hollywood, the Wall Street Journal reports. here  Not that companies are Mother Teresa. In an ideal world, we're all Bono and Angela Jolie, holding hands and adopting kids. In reality, of course, media giants and other companies realize there are untapped and unexplored markets galore if they jet to other hemispheres. (See my recent VentureBeat.com story, click here a Newsweek 2007 story on "The New India" here and a Time magazine graphics package on India's economy and demographics here ). The global downturn is likely to worsen, which means Western companies will keep hunting overseas for growth.

 

At the recent FICCI/FRAMES global film and media conference in Mumbai, here Indian filmmakers and producers praised Slumdog. But they reminded all that they've been making notable films for decades. Directors such as Shekhar Kapur (photo above right), the outspoken Indian filmmaker (here and his blog here) best known in the West for directing Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett, said more affordable and realistic films need to be made for all markets and classes. "There are so many stories to tell," Kapur said. Kapur told Time magazine in 2005 that Asians will make up most of the world's movie-going consumers by 2015, calling it "reverse cultural colonialism," and he may be right. see here  One small example of a contemporary Indian film that few Westerners have seen is the award-winning Hum Tum ("You and Me"), a love story produced by Yash Raj Films here and starring Rani Mukerji here and Saif Ali Khan. here What a concept: believable, multi-dimensional characters in modern India. (Rani Mukerji is a forlorn boutique shop owner, a Sandra Bullock who can dance, and Saif Ali Khan plays a womanizing cartoonist who reminds me of Sean Penn -- see video below.) . . . The issue debated in Mumbai parallels the long-running debate in the U.S. over media images and opportunities for minority filmmakers.  It's a short cross-polar flight from Spike Lee's Black America (Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X) here and Wayne Wang's Multicultural America (The Joy Luck Club, Maid in Manhattan with Jennifer Lopez, Last Holiday with Queen Latifah) here to Bollywood and beyond. Producers and filmmakers of all backgrounds must wrestle with the cross-over issue and a new global business model: Stay true to the original cultural vision, or appeal to broader markets? British producer David Thompson (Revolutionary Road, The Other Boleyn Girl) here said he's looking at a potential film on bandra dancing. "But how will it work in the UK, India and elsewhere?" he said. "Do you stick to the key idea, or do you embrace the fusion of ideas?" According to NBC Universal executive Sab Kanaujia, here several broad forces add to the challenges: The convergence of media, entertainment and technology. The democratization of content development. The "defragmentation" of the media industry. "And as the media market fragments," he said, "we have to go out and reach all those fragments . . . " Good luck with that, guys.

 

 

A U.S. delegation at the film gathering included actor Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon, Mandela, Lonesome Dove). Glover, a political activist long before it became fashionable among the glitterati (Vanity Fair story here and his production company Louverture Films here), was in Mumbai with U.S. politicians and business executives to promote cultural and economic ties with India, and to join Congressman John Lewis in accepting an award. Screenwriter Joslyn Barnes, here his partner in the Louverture Films, also joined the U.S. crew. Louverture Films has produced several Africa-related projects, so maybe an India-based film is in the works. In a run-and-gun interview at a gala dinner banquet, before security chased me away, Glover spoke of the "re-imagining" of the world economy and India:

 

 

A sidenote: While Big Media cranked out its boilerplate coverage of Slumdog, regional and ethnic journalists gave it a fresh spin. Check out "Seeing India through a foreign lens" by Sandip Roy at the San Francisco Chronicle's sfgate.com, here a GlobalPost.com report by Saritha Rai here and this moving multimedia piece on the vast Dharavi slum in Mumbai by San Jose Mercury News videographer Dai Sugano, on Beet.TV. here