Few films in recent years have generated as much buzz as Slumdog Millionaire, the British-Indian film based in the slums of Mumbai. It has won five Critics’ Choice Awards, four Golden Globes and seven BAFTA Awards, and is nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
I just called to ask...Early on, film critic Ben Walters spotted this aspect. He asked in The Guardian on 9 December 2008: Is Slumdog Millionaire the first truly 21st-century film? Among his reasons: “Jamal works in a call centre decorated with London Underground paraphernalia and whose employees are kept up to date on EastEnders plotlines to improve their chances of successful small talk with their customers. Aptly enough, the customers are mobile phone users – another emblem of 21st-century connectivity – and a mobile plays a crucial part in the story’s climax.”
And now it turns out that a real life ICT experiment triggered the idea of the Slumdog story.
Indian author Vikas Swarup, on whose 2005 novel Q&A the movie is based, has recently revealed how he was inspired by the hole-in-the-wall project. This was an initiative by Dr. Sugata Mitra, chief scientist at NIIT, a leading computer software and training company in New Delhi. Mitra embedded a high-speed computer in a wall separating his firm’s headquarters from an adjacent slum, he discovered that slum children quickly taught themselves how to surf the net, read the news and download games and music. He then replicated the experiment in other locations. Each time the results were similar: within hours, and without instruction, the children began browsing the Internet.
Swarup told Indian Express in January 2009: “That got me fascinated and I realised that there’s an innate ability in everyone to do something extraordinary, provided they are given an opportunity. How else do you explain children with no education at all being able to learn to use the Internet. This shows knowledge is not just the preserve of the elite.”
Discover your world...Dr Mitra’s project was the subject of a 2002 documentary film, called Hole in the Wall, made by the New York based production company GlobalVision.
The film was introduced as follows: A revolution in information technology is redefining poverty, as how much you know is becoming just as important as how much you own. “The Hole in the Wall” examines one possible solution to the growing technological gap between rich and poor — the so-called ‘digital divide’ — that threatens to consign millions to an “information underclass.”
The film was made by Rory O’Connor and Gil Rossellini. An 8-min version was broadcast by PBS in October 2002 in their program Frontline/World. A 60-min version was screened at the United Nations in New York City in December 2002. The film has been widely screened, and won several awards.
Initiator of the Hole in the Wall project carries on his mission to adapt ICTs to serve the unmet needs of India’s poor. Watch Dr Sugata Mitra talk about his work in this TED Video:
I have long wondered if both radio and TV broadcasters store their archival material in black holes – into which everything disappears and nothing ever comes out. And certainly, nothing is shared with anyone else.
In a widely reproduced and commented op ed essay written for SciDev.Net in November 2008, titled Planet before profit for climate change films, I noted:
“It isn’t just climate-related films that are locked up with copyright restrictions. Every year, hundreds of television programmes or video films — many supported by public, corporate or philanthropic funds — are made on a variety of development and conservation topics.
“These are typically aired once, twice or at best a few times and then relegated to a shelf somewhere. A few may be released on DVD or adapted for online use. But the majority goes into archival ‘black holes’, from where they might never emerge again. Yet most of these films have a long shelf life and could serve multiple secondary uses outside the broadcast industry.”
Escape from the Southern 'black hole'?Well, it seems things are changing, albeit very slowly. Last month, we welcomed the announcement from Al Jazeera sharing their news footage online through a Creative Commons license — the first time that video footage produced by a news broadcaster is released for commercial and non-commercial use.
Now comes the news that Australia’s public broadcaster ABC is releasing selected content from its vast archives for non-commercial use by others. And we must thank Charles Darwin for that.
On 12 February 2009, to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, ABC started releasing some archival materials, all based loosely around the theme of evolution and mutation. This Australian first was achieved through ABC’s collaborative media site, Pool.
The next offering to Gene Pool would be a clip from ABC’s Monday Conference in 1971 featuring Stanford entomologist Paul Ehrlich talking about climate change (yes, it’s from 38 years ago!).
These materials are being released under the Creative Commons 3.0 licence allowing people to reuse or remix them in any way they like — as long as it’s for non-commercial use.
On Gene Pool website, ABC said: “You can also create your own work exploring the themes of evolution and mutation in lateral ways, and share them back into the Gene Pool.”
A framework for sharing...As Creative Commons Australia explained: “This means that people can tweak, twist and remix the files to create their own creative interpretation of the themes of evolution and mutation, and share these results with the rest of the world. The idea is to build a whole community up around the project, remixing and reusing the ABC archival material in new and previously unthought of ways. This all culminates in a public exhibition of Gene Pool pieces at Melbourne’s RMIT on November 24th – the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s book The Origin of Species.”
They added: “Just imagine what gems might be hidden away in ABC filing cabinets, waiting to be discovered and put to good use by the population that payed for them in the first place.”
That’s precisely what I’ve been saying for a long time – the taxpayer-funded broadcasters like BBC, NHK or ABC (and their equivalents in other countries) have no moral right to lock away their archives on legal or technical grounds. And to think that some of the content thus held up could actually help us in winning history’s eternal race between education and catastrophe!
Nothing escapes from this one...for nowThe BBC – hailed as a model public broadcaster worldwide – is among the worst offenders on this count. It holds one of the largest archives on environment, natural history and wildlife filmed all over the planet for several decades, yet it stubbornly refuses to share this material with anyone, even when it’s only for strict non-commercial, educational use. Read one example in my July 2007 blog post, The Lawyers who locked up the Butterfly Tree.
This myopic selfishness is contrasted (and put to shame) by exceptional film-makers like Richard Brock (who worked with BBC Natural History Unit for 35 years before leaving it unhappy over its rights management) who have decided to open up their personal video archives for non-commercial use especially in the majority world where such material is in short supply.
We can only hope that ABC’s move would build up pressure on the stubborn old Auntie BBC to finally relent. In fact, this might be a chance for all those public broadcasters – many of them now ‘Aunties without eyeballs’ – to redeem themselves at last, ending decades of copyrights tyranny. (And if that puts their inhouse lawyers out of a job, they can join greedy bankers now lining up for public forgiveness!)
ABC says about its tentative steps to the world of open archives: “It’s a small offering to start but there’ll be a lot more to come. We’re working madly behind the scenes getting clearance to release more more more.”
Watch this space…and keep an eye on that Gene Pool!
Being the fourth monkey?“Historically, organised and commercialised mass media have existed only in the past five centuries, since the first newspapers — as we know them — emerged in Europe. Before the printing press was invented, all news was local and there were few gatekeepers controlling its flow. Having evolved highly centralised systems of media for half a millennium, we are now returning to a second era of mass media — in the true sense of that term. Blogs, wikis and citizen journalism are all signs of things to come.”
This is how Sir Arthur C Clarke and I summed up the transformative change that is currently taking place in the world of mass media, in an essay we co-wrote for the Indian news magazine Outlook in October 2005.
We’d given it the title ‘From Citizen Kane to Citizen Journalist’ – a formulation that I’m still proud of – but the editors changed it to ‘Arise, Citizen Journalist!’. Of course, our original title made evocative sense only for those who knew the popular culture reference to the movie Citizen Kane.
I recently had a chance to revisit these issues and explore them further in a half-hour, in-depth TV interview with media researcher/activist and fellow citizen journalist Sanjana Hattotuwa. This was part of The Interview series produced by Young Asia Television, and broadcast on two Sri Lankan TV channels, TNL and ETV during the second week of February 2009.
Sanjana covered a wide range in his questions. Starting with a brief reflection on my 21-year association with Sir Arthur Clarke, we moved on to the bewildering world of new media and its co-existence with the mainstream media. We discussed the fragmentation of audience and the concern that some current and would-be bloggers harbour: is anyone listening or reading?
And more importantly, how do we get conversations started and going. I look back on my own experience as an active blogger for almost two years, and assert that if we have something new and worthwhile to say, and know how to express it well, we can slowly build up an audience. There’s no blueprint or road map – everything is in ‘beta’ mode, and the name of the game is try-it-and-see!
Here’s that full interview on YouTube, broken into four parts:
Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene – Part 1 of 4:
Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene – Part 2 of 4:
Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene – Part 3 of 4:
Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene – Part 4 of 4:
What happens when a small and culturally diverse group is flown in from different parts of the world, put up in a comfortable hotel, fed well — and mandated to watch two or three dozen excellent films and asked to come up with a selection of ‘the best of the best’?
That pretty much sums up the experience of the final jury process of international film festivals that have a competitive element. The festival secretariat lines up the logistics but entrusts all the rankings and selections of entries to an independent jury – which typically serves without pay, and works long and hard.
Hosting the Wildscreen Film Festival in Colombo, Sri Lanka, which ended last evening, brought back memories from eight years ago, when I served on the global jury of Wildscreen festival in Bristol in October 2000. It wasn’t just the turn of the millennium that made the festival especially remarkable that year. In some ways, Wildscreen 2000 marked a significant change in how wildlife and natural history films are assessed and honoured.
I’ve done this a few times before and since 2000 — among them Earth Vision (Tokyo) in 1993 and Japan Wildlife Festival (Toyama) in 2003. But being on Wildscreen jury was special, for it’s considered to be the world’s largest and most prestigious wildlife and environmental film festival — the ‘green’ equivalent of the Oscars.
Serving on film festival juries can be both tedious and highly rewarding. On the plus side, I get to watch the best of contemporary factual film making on these subjects from all over the world, and then discuss their relative merits with some of the best professionals in the industry. The downside is that no jury can ever satisfy all film makers who enter their work, nor come up with a selection that is universally accepted: after every festival, there are those who feel their creations didn’t receive the recognition they deserved.
While all the film juries I have served on managed to reach consensus decisions, it often wasn’t easy. Much depends on the jury chair’s ability to find common ground among jury members who hold diverse – sometimes even opposite – views. Wildscreen 2000 jury was very ably chaired by Peter Goodchild, who came from a background of science film making, and was once editor of BBC’s Horizon science series (He was called in on short notice when the chair designate Christopher Parsons, co-founder of Wildscreen, fell ill.)
Endless golden sunsets...Among my fellow jurors were conservationist Dr Lee Durrell and Canadian film-maker and co-inventor of Imax Roman Kroitor. Jane Krish, then Executive Director of Wildscreen, kept us going and made sure there wasn’t too much blood on the expensively carpeted floors of the Bristol Marriot hotel where we were holed up.
Details of what happened during that week is now buried too deep beneath sediments of memory. I remember watching and discussing some great films in great company and racing against time to reach our decisions for the awards night. Parallel to this, the festival’s multiple events were taking place in nearby venues but we couldn’t join them – except some social events in the evenings.
I’m only sorry that I haven’t got a single photograph of that occasion in my personal collection – it was a year or two later that I started the routine of taking my camera on all my travels. But I’ve just located, from the digital archives two laptops ago, the opening remarks that Peter Goodchild made at the awards ceremony, which he’d typed out on my machine. That neatly sums up our extraordinary experience:
“In the past week my jury and I have, in effect, left the human race. During our four days’ viewing we have seen no less than 54 films. And in that time we have tramped over billions of tons of sand, swum in every ocean of the world with trillions of fish, experienced 80 full moons, watched the production of 30 tons of elephant droppings, around 120 copulations (not ourselves), 15 rapes (not ourselves), 210 killings including 30 infanticides, several thousand insect bites, and we have done all this in temperatures of 50 degrees Fahrenheit below and temperatures of 50 degrees Centigrade above.
“In those aforementioned copulations we were privy to the sight of a pair of 1 ton testicles accompanied by what looked like 3 meters of stout garden hose, but was referred, very tastefully, by the narrator as a ‘flexible friend’.
“And so it goes on, 73 assorted prehistoric animals, 18 symphony orchestras, around half a dozen heavenly choirs and — we have refrained from killing each other and we learned that Nature is prolific, but merciless, that humankind has screwed things up quite a bit, and still is, but we are beginning to try to remedy our ignorance and mistakes. And now we return to you here with the results of our deliberations amongst what is, with one or two exceptions, an embarrassment of riches…”
Panda Award, a.k.a. 'Green Oscar'From then on, each member of the jury took turns in announcing winners in various categories, some technical and others more editorial. Each winner received the coveted Panda Award, affectionately (and unofficially) known as the ‘Green Oscar’. Wildlife film-makers from Australia, Britain, France, India, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa and the United States shared the honours that evening.
Each Panda award was introduced with a brief citation. I presented two: the Conservation/Environment Award and the award for the best film entry from a country that did not have a long tradition of making natural history films.
When presenting the latter, I noted: “It is tempting to draw parallels between the natural world and the world of natural history film making. There are enormous inequalities and disparities in both. Film makers everywhere find it increasingly difficult to raise adequate budgets, but this has always been a stark fact of life for film makers in those parts of the world that lack a long tradition of producing natural history films. In these harsh conditions, the resourcefulness and ingenuity of film makers are tested on many fronts.
“This festival received relatively few entries from such parts of the world and from such film makers, but we understand that it is better than last time. This indicates the presence of talented professionals working against many odds, and trying to exploit the medium to raise public understanding of the environment. The finalists we saw bear testimony to the resolve and commitment of their film makers — who clearly know the art of story telling on television in ways that best engage their audiences. And we need to remember that some of them reach out to hundreds of millions of viewers. These people can make a difference for the planet.”
The award went to Indian film maker Mike Pandey, for his film Shores of Silence: Whale Sharks in India. The 25-minute film, made in early 2000, was the first ever revelation of the killing of whale sharks on the Indian coastline. It so stirred the collective conscience of the authorities, that the government banned the hunting of these endangered marine creatures seven months later.
Every jury’s selection sends out signals, and this is especially so when it concerns the natural history film industry’s most coveted awards. Beyond selecting the winners, our jury also recommended the expansion of the festival’s scope in two ways.
Firstly, we pointed out that simply documenting animal and plant behaviour and their habitats was no longer adequate in a world facing a multitude of environmental crises. There was an urgent need, we said, to mainstream films that looked at the nexus between the natural environment and human society – both conflict and harmony between the two.
Secondly, we recognised the rapid changes taking place in the worlds of broadcasting and web, which challenges film makers to try out new formats or genres, including some that used much shorter durations than those used in wildlife and natural history films until recently. Reviewing eligible film formats was necessary, we said, in an industry that was embracing multimedia to retain or attract eyeballs.
As Peter Goodchild noted in his remarks: “There’s little doubt that there will be increasing demands for personality led programmes, for cheaper format programmes and, because a valuable award – a panda on the mantelpiece – is one potent way of moderating any feared slides into banality, it seemed to us that the Festival needed to create an award rooted in entertainment, where good work in this kind of programming would be recognised.”
It’s heartening to note that Wildscreen festival took note of these recommendations, as evidenced by changes in subsequent editions of the festival. But Peter’s words still hold true: “What is needed, in our view, is to keep testing alternative forms and approaches, expanding the range of programming and avoiding the dangers of a rut based on a past successes.”
For me, it was more than a fascinating journey to far corners of our endangered planet in the company of the world’s best known broadcaster, and Britain’s most trusted public figure. I recalled how in this very venue, as an eager teenager growing up in the simpler, pre-web days of the 1980s, I watched his pioneering series Life on Earth (1979) and The Living Planet (1984). These path-breaking series redefined how natural history documentaries were made, and inspired a whole new generation of film-makers and nature lovers. A quarter century later, I’m still hooked.
Over the last 25 years, Attenborough has established himself as the world’s leading natural history programme maker with more landmark series: The Trials of Life (1990), The Private Life of Plants (1995), The Life of Birds (1998), The Life of Mammals (2002) and Life in the Undergrowth (2005). The final chapter in the ‘Life’ series is Life in Cold Blood (2008).
As fellow broadcaster Jeremy Paxman noted in a Time magazine tribute to Attenborough: “Life After Death is almost the only natural-history series yet to be made by Attenborough. In a career that has taken him to every corner of the world, he has explored life in all its richness — from mammals and birds to plants and reptiles. No living person has done more to make the people of Planet Earth aware of the world around them.”
Close encounters?But as I wrote in May 2007, “like all creatures big and small in the great Circle of Life that Sir David has so avidly told us about, he too is mortal. At 81, it’s time for the world to look for the next David Attenborough.”
In his Time tribute, Paxman noted that what distinguishes Attenborough is “that boundless, schoolboyish enthusiasm, the infectious joy of discovering the infinite variety of life”. Yet as the popular song goes, dragons live forever, but not so little boys – so the quest for the next Attenborough has quietly preoccupied the minds of many practising or following the world of natural history and environmental film making.
I’m not obsessed with this question (and I wish Sir David many more years of life on Earth and life on the airwaves), but I today popped it to Jeremy Bristow, a producer of environmental programmes at BBC Television, at the end of his fascinating master class on The role of films in Environmental Conservation. Jeremy’s most recent project has been two films hard-hitting films on Climate Change with Sir David Attenborough for BBC1 and the Discovery Channel.
The bad news is that despite searching far and wide – even some competitions – the David Attenborough has yet to be discovered.
“There are many talented, passionate natural history film makers and some of them also have good screen presence — but none to match Sir David,” said Jeremy Bristow. “I know many in the natural history film world have kept their eyes open for a potential successor.”
Perhaps Sir David is a unique product of his time and circumstances, Jeremy speculated. Certainly, there weren’t too many getting into this business in the early days of television broadcasting. The first major programme series to feature Sir David was BBC’s Zooquest, which ran from 1954 to 1963. And then, one thing led to another…and more than 50 years later, he’s still in the business.
To me, it’s the voice – authoritative without at all being pompous or pontificating – that gives Sir David enduring and endearing appeal. Time called it ‘the voice of the environment’.
Now is the time when that voice of reason, moderation and passion is needed more than ever. A time when the natural world is under siege from human-induced accelerated climate change even as the world of science takes daily beatings from assorted fundamentalist forces.
At 82, Sir David still remains not just our most versatile ambassador to the natural world, but also one of the best spokespersons for the rigors of science and intellectual curiosity.
Here’s a recent example of Sir David – taking us on a quick, animated guide to evolution of life on Earth, in a 2009 documentary called Charles Darwin and the Tree of Lifeto mark 150 years since Charles Darwin published his famous Origin of the Species:
The keynote address was delivered by Sri Lankan minister of environment and natural resources. The British Council asked me to speak a few words at the opening as TVE Asia Pacific is a local partner for this event.
Here’s what I said, which sums up why we are in this business:
We are delighted to be partners in hosting Wildscreen film festival in Sri Lanka. We thank our friends at the British Council and Wildscreen festival for this opportunity to join hands.
May I say a brief word about ourselves. We’re Television for Education Asia Pacific — trading as TVE Asia Pacific. We’re a regionally operating media foundation anchored in Colombo and engaging developing countries of Asia. We were set up in 1996 by a group of Asian and European filmmakers and TV professionals to cover the full range of development issues using broadcast television, narrowcast video and now, the web.
We are driven by a belief that what is happening in the world’s largest and most populous region has far-reaching implications not just for our region — but also for the entire planet.
When introducing our work, I like to recall the words of Mahatma Gandhi. Once, when asked by a visiting foreign journalist for his views on wildlife in India, he said: “Sadly, wildlife is declining in our jungles, but wild – life is increasing in our cities.”
It is precisely this wild–life that interests us more. In our work we keep asking: when life itself is going wild, what hope and prospects are there for wildlife, Nature and environment?
For example, we’ve literally just finished a short film looking at environmental restoration of Afghanistan. This will be screened to the environmental minister from around the world who will gather shortly for the UN Environment Programme’s Governing Council meeting in Nairobi.
We can't just walk into a glorious sunset and forget real world challenges - Photo by Niroshan Fernando, TVEAP
Capturing wild-life is now the focus and concern of wildlife and environmental film makers everywhere. There was a time, not too long ago, when films used to simply capture the beauty of Nature and the diversity or behaviour of plants and animals. Such documentation is still very necessary and useful — but it’s no longer sufficient.
In the past couple of decades, all film makers have been challenged to look at how our own ‘wild’ ways of living affects:
– each other in our own human species;
– the rest of Nature and other species; and
– also, the future of life on Earth.
We see this transformation reflected in the content of films entering Wildscreen and other film festivals. I saw early signs of this when I served as a juror at Wildscreen 2000 festival. This process has gathered momentum since.
To remain relevant and topical, films can no longer just cover ‘green’ subjects — they have to acknowledge the ‘brown’ issues as well as the harsh black-and-white, life-or-death concerns such as climate change.
At the same time, we have seen a rapid diversification of formats or genres — especially with the emergence of online and mobile platforms. These now compete with broadcast television to engage audiences. This is both good news and bad news for us engaged in film making and film outreach. Yes, we now have more ways of reaching people than ever before. But engaging audiences is harder: people have more choice — and more distractions!
Of course, we can’t just give up the good struggle and walk away into those beautiful sunsets. At TVE Asia Pacific, we believe that making good films is only half the job done. Distributing them far and wide is just as important. This is why the slogan of our own organisation is: Moving images, moving people!
In that process, film festivals such as this one play a key role. We’re very happy to add an extra day of screenings to this event. On Saturday in this auditorium, we’ll be showing a number of films on climate change and sustainable development drawn from our own catalogue of films we distribute to broadcast, civil society and educational users across Asia.
These are small efforts in a big world. I can only hope all these help us in winning history’s greatest race – which, according to H G Wells, is one between education and catastrophe!
Wildscreen comes to ColomboWildscreen, the world’s largest and most prestigious wildlife and environmental film festival, will be touring India and Sri Lanka in February 2009.
Nine wildlife or environmental filmmakers from the UK will be coming to India and Sri Lanka as part of this event, organized by the British Council. The festival will also see screenings of wildlife and environmental films from across the world, some of them winners of the Wildscreen festival’s Panda Awards, the environmental equivalent of the Oscars.
The Wildscreen Festival was founded by Sir Peter Scott in 1982. It has been organised every alternate year for the past 25 years, and is now considered to be the world’s largest and most prestigious wildlife and environmental film festival. Held in Bristol, UK, it attracts hundreds of delegates from around the globe who work in film, television and new media, as well as those involved in environmental conservation.
The Festival is coming to Sri Lanka for the first time. The programme, held at the British Council Colombo on 12 – 13 February 2009, will screen several award winning films on climate change and wildlife, showcasing the best of current environmental film making worldwide. On 14 February 2009, TVE Asia Pacific will present a selection of films on environment and sustainable development drawn from their global catalogue, which includes some Sri Lankan and South Asian titles.
Sam Gregory“It’s an immensely exciting time for people working with video. More and more people creating and using video, more places to share it, more ways to place it in front of people who can make a difference.
“It raises challenges too: saturation of images and compassion-fatigue, finding your place to be heard, and the safety and security and consent issues that arise when many more people are filming each other.
“But overall I think we’re seeing a really powerful moment for individual expression but also collective accountability being supported via image-making.”
So says Sam Gregory programme director of Witness, a human rights organisation which uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. The New York-anchored organisation works around the world to ’empower people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change’.
http://www.witness.orgSam recalls how he was once making films and also involved in activism, and ‘frustrated at how the two didn’t fit together’.
He adds: “In the traditional TV documentary world, the advocacy purpose of film was under-utilized. The fact that you got 500,000 viewers for a TV broadcast told you nothing about whether that turned into action. So I started looking for ways to really make the video fit as a tool for real advocacy and change-making, and came upon WITNESS.”
We at TVE Asia Pacific worked closely with Sam in 2002-2004, when we implemented a collaborative Asian regional project called Truth Talking where Witness was a partner. It was through Witness that I met courageous info activists like Joey R B Lozano.
In his long years of journalism in India, my friend Darryl D’Monte had faced all sorts of questions and situations. But this was one question that stunned and left him speechless for a while.
A visiting Canadian TV crew made this request in the 1970s, when Darryl was resident editor of The Times of
India. He was giving them some insights on the extent of poverty in his city of Bombay, since renamed as Mumbai. The crew had heard of the deliberate maiming of street children, before being employed as beggars. A disabled child would evoke more sympathy, increasing the daily collection for gangsters operating them from behind the scenes.
Darryl wasn’t willing to be associated with this ‘staging’. “Well, it’s going to happen anyway,” was the film crew’s cynical answer.
Now, fast forward 30 years to the present. At one point in the British-Indian movie Slumdog Millionaire, we see a young girl being blinded by a gangster who shelters and feeds a small army of children — all unleashed on Mumbai on a daily basis to tug at the heart strings of its teeming millions.
The film’s protagonist Jamal escapes the same fate by making a mad dash for freedom with his brother, Salim. But years later, they cross the gangster’s path again, with devastating results – for him.
Vikas Swarup: Look what I've started...Set and filmed in India, Slumdog Millionaire is the story of a young uneducated man from the slums of Mumbai who appears on the Indian TV’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (Kaun Banega Crorepati) and does so well to reach the final question that the game show host and the police suspect him of cheating.
Some Indians feel their country’s ugly underbelly has been magnified by locating and filming part of the story in the slums of Mumbai. But director Danny Boyle, who sees his film as a Dickensian tale, says he shot in real, gritty locations “to show the beauty and ugliness and sheer unpredictability” of the city.
Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, who wrote the 2005 novel Q and A on which the movie is based, has a similar view. “This isn’t social critique,” he told The Guardian in an interview. “It’s a novel written by someone who uses what he finds to tell a story. I don’t have firsthand experience of betting on cricket or rape or murder. I don’t know if it’s true that there are beggar masters who blind children to make them more effective when they beg on the streets. It may be an urban myth, but it’s useful to my story.”
To me, Slumdog Millionaire feels like a cross between the acclaimed Brazilian slum movie City of God (Portuguese name: Cidade de Deus, 2002) and Quiz Show, the 1994 American historical drama film about TV quiz scandals in the 1950s.
City of God (2002) was filmed in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro
City of God is a Brazilian crime drama film directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, released in its home country in 2002 and worldwide in 2003. It was adapted by Bráulio Mantovani from the 1997 novel of the same name written by Paulo Lins.
The film’s depiction of narcotic drug rings, hold-ups, street violence and police corruption may not have been what the upper middle class Brazilians wanted to showcase to the rest of the world, but the film’s stark if grisly authenticity resonated with movie audiences around the world. Most of the actors were residents of favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro, such as Vidigal and the Cidade de Deus itself. City of God became one of the highest-grossing foreign films released in the United States up to that time.
The makers of Slumdog Millionaire adopted a similar approach. Its co-director Loveleen Tandan says she likes to get as close to reality as possible. This drove her to the slums of East Bandra to look for young children who resembled the protagonists in the story.
As she recalled in a recent interview with Tehelka: “I was very keen to get real slum kids, which is why I convinced them (producers) to do one-third of the scenes in Hindi. I made a scratch tape with real street kids. The team was surprised that Hindi actually made it brighter and more alive.”
Indeed, Slumdog doesn’t feel like a ‘foreign film’ despite it having a fair number of English subtitles, which only enhance the overall cinematic experience.
But how realistic should films try to become, before the local realities are distorted or local sensibilities are affected? Where does documentary end and drama begin? These questions will continue to be debated across India and elsewhere while Slumdog enthralls millions on its first theatrical release.
Feature film makers can exercise their creative license far more than factual film makers. I doubt if the creators of authentic, close-to-the-ground movies like City of God and Slumdog Millionaire set out with any specific social agenda. They are in the business of entertainment, and just happen to find plenty of drama in real life in places like urban slums. We might argue that in the right hands, dramatised movies can draw mass attention to development issues and challenges far more effectively than the often dull and dreary documentaries.
Kalpana Sharma: Eyes wide open“If through (the movie) the world gets a peek at an India inhabited by millions of people who continue to live their lives without clean water, sanitation or electricity, what is the problem?” asks another Indian friend and long-time Mumbai resident Kalpana Sharma.
In a perceptive essay titled Shantytowns of the Mind, written in The Indian Express in early January 2009 before she saw the film, Kalpana flagged important concerns: “Slumdog Millionaire’s success raises some deeper questions. How do we depict poverty as writers, filmmakers, journalists? Is it fair to expect us all the time to give a full, balanced, sensitive portrayal? Or is it inevitable that we write, film, for our audiences? And if, as a byproduct, people are sensitized, so be it. Also, if they are annoyed, so be it. If we are considered exploitative, so be it.”
Kalpana speaks with authority, and not just because she lives in the megacity of Mumbai (population: 13 million and rising) which, she points out, is half made up of slums. In 2000, she wrote a book titled Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum. Far from being a cold, clinical analysis of facts, figures and trends, it’s a book about the extraordinary people who live there, “many of whom have defied fate and an unhelpful State to prosper through a mix of backbreaking work, some luck and a great deal of ingenuity”.
Kalpana ends her essays with these words: “In the end you realise as a writer, a journalist or a filmmaker, that the best you can do is to shine a torch, a searchlight, on an entrenched problem. But the solution will not be found merely by that illumination. For that, there are many more steps to be taken.
“Slumdog Millionaire has focused its lens on the children of India’s slums through a work of fiction. What we do to change their future is the non-fiction that has yet to be written.”
Romulus Whitaker introduces a young volunteer to a snake at Agumbe research station, Tamil Nadu, India – photo courtesy Rolex Awards
“I haven’t had to do a nine-to-five job ever in my life, and that is a very envious situation to be in if you like the wild. Life has been much like a river in that it picks you up and carries you along. I have got into things as they come towards me.”
That’s how Romulus Whitaker, reptile and amphibian specialist, conservationist and filmmaker sums up his long, eventful and illustrious career. At 65, he is full of zest for life, ready to take on new challenges in protecting India’s forests and wildlife.
I caught up with this American-born, naturalised Indian citizen a few days ago when he and fellow Indian Moji Riba were presented with their Rolex awards at a ceremony in New Delhi.
Of course, I’d heard about Romulus (Rom) Whitaker for years and seen some of his natural history films. In some ways, his style was a bit like that of ‘The Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin — putting himself in the picture, sometimes in daring encounters with potentially dangerous animals…all in the name of bringing nature a bit closer to us in our living rooms.
But such similarities go only so far. Rom takes a less dramatic and more philosophical approach to humans’ relationship with Nature. For him, television is only a means to an end. As Rolex award profile put it, “the combination of a foreign name, mildly Viking looks inherited from his Swedish mother, an unexpected fluency in local Indian dialects and a thoroughly irreverent attitude” makes him “a highly unconventional yet effective conservationist in a country far from his birthplace”.
To catch a glimpse of this remarkable man, watch this ‘Incredible India’ PSA featuring Romulus Whitaker:
Rom was the founder director of the Snake Park in Chennai. The park was established in 1972 ‘to preserve the endangered reptile species in the sub continent’.
Rom’s career in film making was a byproduct of his life-long desire to bring people and Nature closer. He chronicled his venture into the world of television and film in a chapter he wrote for a book published by India’s Centre for Environment Education and TVE Asia Pacific in 2002. In that book, titled Wild Dreams, Green Screens, eight leading Indian film-makers shared insights about their careers, including how and when they decided to get involved in this field. They also talked about some of the exciting — and frustrating — experiences they have had while filming nature and wildlife.
From dreams to screen…
In the early 1970s, Rom worked with a Russian film crew who turned up to do a sequence on snakes for a film based on the famous Kipling story, Rikki Tikki Tavi. “It was fun for me to help them figure out how to film a snake stealing an egg from a bird’s nest – and it took a whole week to do it. I was impressed by their patience and persistence,” Rom recalled in the book.
After that, every few months, some film crew would show up to do either a short news story on the Snake Park, or a short film on Indian snakes for foreign audiences. India’s stereotyped reputation as a land of snakes and snake-charmers partly fueled this interest.
Rom continues: “By the 1980s, I started thinking I knew something about making wildlife films – even though I didn’t have a TV, and there weren’t really very many such documentaries screened anywhere in India. I was aware that films could show and teach people about my beloved reptiles like nothing else. Surely the Snake Park with nearly a million visitors a year could make good use of such films, and I knew the visitors would go away with a new awareness of how beautiful, graceful and interesting reptiles are. A single broadcast on a TV channel and 20 million people would be able to see it all at once!”
Determined to do his own films, Rom teamed up with two school friends John and Louise Riber, and Shekar Dattatri, to make a film on India’s snakebite problem. They had a tiny budget (Indian Rupees 50,000, which is approximately US$ 1,000 today), an old Arri camera and ‘a lot of enthusiasm’.
One thing led to another. “‘Snakebite’ turned out to be a good little half-hour film which was translated into several Indian languages… Amazingly, this little film won a first prize at a festival in the United States, and was awarded the Golden Eagle by the American Movie and Television Federation. Lo and behold, I was a filmmaker!”
Vikram Akula (left) presents Rolex Awards certificate to Romulus Whitaker in Delhi, 22 January 2009
We missed Shekar at the Delhi event – he couldn’t make it due to scheduling difficulties. But as Rom has written, the Whitaker-Dattatri partnership continued for several years while they struggled with ‘very crude equipment’ and tiny budgets. Films like ‘Seeds of Hope’ (on tree planting) and ‘A Cooperative for Snake Catchers’ followed.
Rom further writes in his chapter: “We worked hard on these films, learning as we went along month after month, working with really good people like the tree planters of Auroville and the Palni Hills Conservation Council, and, of course, the fantastic Irula tribals. We did have a few narrow escapes with snakes, but we always felt we were in much more danger driving down National Highway 45, than from any of our venomous subjects!”
Rom’s film making in the past two decades has taken him not only to the far corners of India, but to other biodiversity hotspots of the world – such as Indonesia. As the years passed, his enhanced reputation attracted big names in wildlife films, such as National Geographic, Discovery/Animal Planet and BBC Natural History. Combining his conservation knowledge with public education skills, Rom has also been presenter of several films.
The King (Cobra) and I
These multiple involvements have earned him a string of awards – his documentary King Cobra made for National Geographic won him an Emmy award, considered the television equivalent of the Oscars.
Despite the rigorous demands of film making (and the occasional lure of television medium), Rom has remained active in conservation circles both within India and at global level. While many conservationists in India focus their attention on charismatic megafauna like tigers and elephants, Rom has stayed faithful to his chosen field of reptiles and amphibians. Years ago he realized that his beloved species cannot survive unless their natural habitats do. So, like many others, he evolved from naturalist to conservationist.
“A lot of us get wrapped up in our own little special animal and then we wake up and start thinking it has got to be habitat and it has to be eco-development that involves people and, now, in my case, it has crystallized into the whole idea of water resources,” he says.
Rom’s colourful career has itself become a subject for other filmmakers. In 2007, he was featured in a critically-acclaimed documentary produced by PBS, under their “Nature” banner, on “super-sized” crocodiles and alligators, which was filmed in India, East Africa and Australia.
And in January 2009, Whitaker returned to the small screen in another “Nature” documentary on real-life reptiles such as Komodo dragons and Dracos that inspired tales of dragons.
The man who turned to moving images in the 1980s to move people’s minds towards conservation is still engaged in that business. He is a conservationist who puts a premium on public engagement, and especially on working with children and young people.
He says: “We are doing a lot of work with young people, bringing them to the forest and showing them what happens here and why it matters. It can be very difficult to change adult attitudes, but with the young, it is easier to get across the knowledge that what we are doing to the forests we are doing to ourselves.”
In Romulus Whitaker\’s hands, snakes become educational tools for children and icons of nature conservation. Photo courtesy Rolex Awards
I’ve done this a few times before and since 2000 — among them 
Open Minds! 