Slumdog Shortfall
The Telegraph‘s Dean Nelson and Barney Henderson are reporting that the parents of Slumdog Millionaire‘s child actors — Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail — are accusing the film’s producers of “exploiting and underpaying the eight-year-olds, disclosing that both face uncertain futures in one of Mumbai’s most squalid slums
Director Danny Boyle “has spoken of how he set up trust funds for Rubina and Azharuddin and paid for their education. But it has emerged that the children, who played Latika and Salim in the early scenes of the film, were paid less than many Indian domestic servants.
“Rubina was paid √Ǭ£500 for a year’s work while Azharuddin received √Ǭ£1,700, according to the children’s parents.
“However a spokesman for the film’s American distributors, Fox Searchlight, disputed this saying the fees were more than three times the average annual salary an adult in their neighbourhood would receive. They would not disclose the actual sum.
“Both children were found places in a local school and receive √Ǭ£20 a month for books and food. However, they continue to live in grinding poverty and their families say they have received no details of the trust funds set up in their names. Their parents said that they had hoped the film would be their ticket out of the slums, and that its success had made them realise how little their children had been paid.
“The children received considerably less than the poor Afghan child stars of The Kite Runner, who embarrassed their Hollywood producers when they disclosed that they had been paid √Ǭ£9,000.
“Rubina and Azharuddin live a few hundreds yards from each other in a tangle of makeshift shacks alongside Mumbai’s railway tracks at Bandra. Azharuddin is in fact worse off than he was during filming: his family’s illegal hut was demolished by the local authorities and he now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarpaulin with his father, who suffers from tuberculosis.
“‘There is none of the money left. It was all spent on medicines to help me fight TB,’ Azharuddin’s father, Mohammed Ismail, said. “We feel that the kids have been left behind by the film. They have told us there is a trust fund but we know nothing about it and have no guarantees.’”
So I suppose the underhanded campaigns to take down the Oscar Frontrunner have begun….sigh. It’s so hard to hold on to my childlike belief that awards are meant to honor excellence.
Hmmm. “And the Academy Award for best picture goes to…Benjamin Button?”
Not saying this is a valid reason for SM to not win the Oscar. I’m just sayin’.
The problem is that Hollywood producers don’t care that they are playing God with the lives of children like these, Even more so in the case of Kite Runner, where, for fear that they might be killed, the children, who were never adequately represented, eventually had to be flown out of the country, away from their extended families and the lives they had always known, however meagre, Hollywood always pays less than it should and always takes less care than it should of the lives of others in furtherance of its own ends. And they call it art.
Didn’t the same thing happened to the street actors in the Brazilian film, CITY OF GOD? I heard that one of them actually got shot dead over a drug deal…
Admittedly I do not know all the details, but it seems to me that these kids must have LOVED working on the film. For one, it got them out of what is no doubt a shittier (pun intended) job and for better pay, and i’m sure they’re stars in the eyes of their friends.
I don’t think its the job of the producers to care for these kids for life. They gave them a great gig theyll always remember at a good wage. Who would ever turn that down?
Harvey Weinstein will do anything for an Oscar.
I would be shocked if Weinstein isn’t hovering in the background here…
That said, as a rule, I find the timing of these award takedowns tasteless, but to step outside of that for a moment, I hope this story will at least send some of the Slumdog 4Ever brigade’s claims of its transformative potential and social realism to bed for a while.
I think a lot of its defenders have gotten into dicey ethical territory lately, moving from talking about its aesthetic kick to suggesting it is somehow going to change lives in India, and provide a revelatory experience that will transform Western ideas of Indian poverty overnight. Stories like this put such arguments in their place: transformative huh? Tell that to the kid who got paid a whopping 2 grand in pounds, which went to pay his dad’s TB bill.
Interestingly, none of this really jumped at me as hugely problematic until I considered the implications of offering in lieu of more cash a trust fund, should the kids stay in school until they’re 18. Assuming we do take the portrayal the film offers of slum life as accurate, would it then be safe to guess that neither Jamal, Salim, nor Latika or any of the types they stand for would be able to stay in school until 18? Wait, I thought the film was saying all you needed was street learning and hard experience, not education!
Smear or no, this story raises some troubling questions about the kind of praise we throw around lightly when a film demonstrates a “social consciousness.”
This smells to high heaven. There must be a contract that the ch ildren and the parents signed. Studios and producers are dumb, that contract is probably iron-clad. I betcha some slick Indian lawyer is behind this. To hell with the parents. Next time the producers should get some “rich” kids to play the parts so that the parents won’t cry poverty at Oscar time.
I’m a huge supporter of Slumdog and this may stink in it’s origin but it’s still unconscionable if it’s true. The Bandra tracks are amongst the most squalid, desolate places I’ve ever been (much worse than the Dharavi slum where the film was set which is poor but does teem with life and vitality), I dropped an Australian friend at the terminus station there last week and had to leave early because the stink of human shit was too strong (there are no toilets, slumdwellers have to crap on the tracks) and I’d eaten seafood for lunch.
I’m going to grab one of my Indian friends and see if we can track down the kids this weekend (it’s only a few miles from my apartment). If we find them and if nobody is helping them, I’ll write to Jeff and see if he’ll put up a link to a place where anyone who wants to contribute to a collection can. At least to put a roof over their heads and hook them up with an educational NGO. The parents ripped through a lot of rupees, but surely one of the points of the film is that adult’s greed blights many of these children’s lives. TB treatment would not have cost 150K rupees, not even a tenth of that. And that amount would have paid for 150 months of a proper, safe, slum dwelling. But the kids, with the best performances in the film, deserve a better chance than that. If it’s true.
Fuck Harvey. I have an old brokedown spare TV to throw out the fucking window if THE READER actually wins Best Picture.
OK, just actually read the Telegraph article. Seems like Danny Boyle is doing his darndest to do the right thing in the right way. Boyle’s statement said they’d ‚Äúpaid painstaking and considered attention to how Azhar and Rubina‚Äôs involvement in the film could be of lasting benefit to them over and above the payment they received for their work‚Äù. Was a bit of a rash impulse to jump in and get involved when it would be less thought out, probably do more harm than good, and quite frankly it’s his turf unless is absolves responsibility through negligence – which doesn’t sound like the case if he’s visiting their teachers at school ect.. He seems like a good guy and was surprised when I read the reprint of this (without his side) in the Hindustan Times yesterday. What do you think guys?
plastiqueelephant, YES. Do that and track down the kids. Maybe somebody can set up an online fund for those kids and their families.
I also think Danny Boyle seems like a good guy– that’s the same guy who directed MILLIONS, for god’s sake!!! (another good movie). I like to be optimistic, so I also think he’s trying his best to help those poor kids.
‘There is none of the money left. It was all spent on medicines to help me fight TB,’ Azharuddin’s father, Mohammed Ismail, said.”
The cash is gone because the father spent it on himself. Doesn’t India have national healthcare? Isn’t this why you have to put kid actor’s money in trusts – to keep parents from blowing it?
Didn’t the same thing happened to the street actors in the Brazilian film, CITY OF GOD? I heard that one of them actually got shot dead over a drug deal…
plastiqueelephant, YES. Do that and track down the kids. Maybe somebody can set up an online fund for those kids and their families.
I also think Danny Boyle seems like a good guy– that’s the same guy who directed MILLIONS, for god’s sake!!! (another good movie). I like to be optimistic, so I also think he’s trying his best to help those poor kids.
Question to everyone: Didn’t they have a contract? an agent? an attorney? Didn’t their parents sign a contract? Wasn’t their an audition to find the “best”? If the answer is yes,what’s the problem?
Yes, poor slum-dwelling kids who wouldn’t know a Hollywood contract from the shit that flows through their sewers, always have access to high-powered Hollywood lawyers, and agents, and managers. I mean Ari Gold just hangs around in the backrooms of Mumbai slums waiting for Hollywood to call so they can screw them with terrible contracts.
All you people are so insanely Hollywood-centric that you simply have no idea what it’s like for a family in one of the worst slums in the world to be approached by Hollywood producers for one of your kids to star in a movie. A Hollywood movie! You say yes to ANYTHING. ANYTHING! Which is how the kids in The Kite Runner agreed to act in a film which showed one of them to be raped. Which any duly appointed manager or agent would have told them not to do.
Contract? They can’t fucking read, you idiots. Agents? Are you nuts? Do you think the producersof Slumdog suggested they should be represented by a Hollywood agent? You think these kids know CAA from a shit-hole in the ground? Lawyers? The lawyers are in cahoots with the producers, which is who is paying them. not the kids and their families from the poorest slums in the world.
Get a grip.
At the moment, you’ll have a feeling of proud. The articles by China’s manufacturers are not only in a good quality, but also in a great many of quantity, and in a very lower price. For example, a same suit Made in China, might marked five to ten dollars that would cost one hundred dollars that made in Western countries. Many people couldn’t afford for it but Chinese goods are most popular now than ever before.The popularation of Chinese objcets is almost covered the market place all over the world, including the European and American markets.
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