The movie Slumdog Millionaire has been a worldwide hit for Fox Searchlight, the movie’s distributor. The film has won four Golden Globe awards and has been nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. The story is about a teenager who grew up in the slums of Mumbai, India, and is picked to be a contestant on "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?" After he performs miraculously on the show and becomes a big winner, he is arrested and suspected of cheating. While the police are interrogating him, flashbacks show events in his life that explain how he knew the correct answers.
To film the movie, director Danny Boyle hired three local children who spoke only Hindi. The youngest of the children comes from a middle-class area, but the other two children, Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, actually live in slums of Mumbai that are similar to the slums shown in the movie. The producers of the film created a trust fund for the kids that they could access only if they attended school. They had never been to school, so the filmmakers said that as long as they enrolled in school and stayed there until they turned 18, they could then have the money in the trust fund in addition to the salaries they were paid for working on the movie.
However, an article in The Telegraph, a British newspaper, accused Boyle and the film’s producers of paying the kids a measly salary, saying that the money they received was less pay than many domestic servants in India are paid. Fox Searchlight reacted to the critical article by issuing a statement saying that the child actors were paid more than three times the annual salary of an average adult in Mumbai, but for working only 30 days rather than a year.They also said that the kids and their families were given money to pay for basic living expenses, medical care, and other bills they had while filming.
The parents of the children said that the children live in squalor in one of Mumbai’s worst slums, so they had hoped the money from acting in the movie would help their children be able to rise above their circumstances to seek a better future for themselves. And although the filmmakers did pay for their school and costs of living, they still live in abject poverty and their parents claim that they were not given any information about trust funds being set up.
Azharuddin and Rubina live in a cluster of shacks beside the railroad tracks in Mumbai, and one of them is in even worse circumstances now than he was before starring in the movie. During filming, the local authorities learned of Azharuddin’s family having an illegal hut, so they demolished it. Now the child and his father, who has tuberculosis, sleep beneath a plastic tarp. The money from the film has all been spent on medicines to help Azharuddin’s father in his struggle with TB.
Rubina and her family live beside an open sewer. Her father, a carpenter, suffered a broken leg while the movie was being filmed and he has been out of work ever since. Although Rubina enjoyed making the movie and found the experience glamorous and exciting, her parents are disappointed that the movie has been so successful and is making so much money while their daughter still lives in poverty. They say that they don’t regret letting their daughter be in the movie - they just didn’t know what she should have been paid.
After the story broke in The Telegraph, the children were so inundated by the media that Fox Searchlight had them moved into private housing away from the glare of the cameras. And for now, the movie’s director and producer seem content to state that they did a wonderful thing by setting up a trust fund for the kids who were directly responsible for the movie making hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. Searchlight’s statement to the press said that they are extremely proud of the movie’s success and proud of the way they have treated the children.
But the question remains: if these children were poor American child actors, would they still be poor after filming the movie? Surely Danny Boyle and Fox Searchlight can spare a little extra pocket change to get these children out of their squalor right now, instead of making them wait until they are 18 to receive a lump sum that will be shamefully small compared to the wealth the filmmakers will enjoy as a result of their efforts. For a movie that is supposedly such a heartwarming tale, the real life story is pretty coldhearted indeed.
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