Slumdog and/or millionaire?

Having seen the film

'Slumdog Millionaire' I'm now reading some of the reviews and accolades, and the allegations against its creators by Indian and rest-of-the-world's critics and audiences.

UK director Danny Boyle is being accused of exploiting the Mumbai slum children who played the roles of slum children in the film, by paying them very much less than other actors.

The film's distributors are pointing out that the children's salaries are equivalent to three times the annual salary of an adult living in the slum. I'm not sure why that's relevant. If a company calculated an employee's salary in terms of ratio to their dad's wages or the average income of their home neighbourhood, there would be serious questions, not least about its sanity.

Residents of Dharavi slum, where the child actors live, are understandably ambivalent about wealthy foreigners coming in and filming their daily lives and environment for a fictional rags-to-riches film. The Times of India points out that Indian film-makers have always made films about poverty and that there wouldn't be the same objections if this was a documentary.

Perhaps one point is that documentaries tend to get taken seriously and sometimes result in action to change the situation they comment on. But fictional films may actually have more impact on people's understanding and compassion, and make a wider audience aware of a previously unknown reality.

The question is, what do people do with their new awareness of that particular community's suffering? 'Slumdog Millionaire' has been described as 'a feel-good film', an extraordinary comment that suggests the reviewer has somehow screened out the poverty, torture, serial rape of little children, violence and exploitation which are real-life features of vulnerable slum communities, and convinced him/herself that they are simply gritty urban wallpaper to the romantic plot.

There are no easy answers, I think, to the ethics of filming or viewing people's lives and making art or commentary of them, and I'm saying that from the point of view of someone who has spent time in a Mumbai slum for the purpose of describing its residents' lives in my book, about stress and how people survive it.

I was appreciative when people agreed to be interviewed, happy they saw it as an opportunity to have a voice, and not surprised when others regarded it as an intrusion on their privacy.

But in all these recent discussion about ethics aroused by the 'Slumdog' film, it'sinteresting that Danny Boyle has been accused of the wealthy Western film-maker's sin of 'peddling poverty porn,' but no one seems to be accusing the Western film industry of its far more common trend of 'advocating affluence addiction.'

Perhaps we're too busy living it to notice it any more?