(Hindi/1988/Color/133min)
Director: Mira Nair
Cast: Shafiq Syed, Sarafuddin Qurrassi, Raju Barnard, Raghubir Yadav, Anneta Kanwar, Nana Patekar
Camera d'Or to the Director at the 41st International Film Festival at Cannes
Jury Awards: Ex-Aequo Ecumenical Prize and Air-Canada Public Prize for the most popular film
Montreal World Film Festival - 1988
Krishna, a 10 year-boy, is abandoned by the traveling circus he works for, and comes to Mumbai dreaming of making 500 rupees to take home to his mother in the village. Once in the city he is immediately surrounded by its madness and cacophony; policemen, brothels, traffic, mad men, middlemen, the trading of drugs and flesh, impossible movie fantasies and children like himself everywhere surviving and succumbing to the appetite of the city.
Krishna begins to work at the bottom of the street hierarchy, and becomes Chaipau, or one who delivers tea and bread. In the process of his tea delivery, he meets characters that will ultimately change his life; Chillum, a 25-year-old spirited veteran of the streets who earns his living sealing drugs for Baba, the mercurial "bossman' of the red-light area. Baba lives with Rekha, a strong, resilient prostitute, and their 8-year-old daughter, Manju.
Into this world enters Solasaal, or sweet sixteen, a rebellious young Nepalese girl who has been forcibly brought to Mumbai to be sold as a virgin prostitute. Chaipau unwittingly acts as a catalyst in their lives until their stories coalesce into a surprising and climactic end.
Salaam Bombay! was a fiction film unique in many ways. Unlike the norm in Indian movies, it was a film that eschewed studios and sets, using the streets, railway platforms, brothels and alleys of Bombay's underworld instead as its canvas. It presented a Bombay yet unseen to a wider public; a portrait of a city that was all around yet until then impenetrable.
Please contact Prakash Reddy at 373-0265 / 373-0841 for further details.
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