A teenager who grew up scavenging on the edges of Mumbai's slums lands a spot on the Indian version of a televised quiz show, and his run through the questions is good enough that the studio starts asking how a boy with no schooling could possibly know so much.
What is Slumdog Millionaire about?
Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of Jamal, a young man pulled in for questioning the moment his quiz-show streak starts making producers suspicious. Under interrogation, the film moves backward through his childhood on the streets, the brother who shaped and then complicated his path, and a girl named Latika who has drifted in and out of his life since they were children. Each question he is asked on air turns out to trace back to a specific, hard-won memory, and the film builds its structure around that connection between a game show and a life spent surviving Mumbai's underclass.
About the cast
Dev Patel plays the adult Jamal, with Freida Pinto as Latika and Anil Kapoor as the show's host, a role that sits at the center of the interrogation framing. Irrfan Khan appears as the police inspector questioning Jamal, and Saurabh Shukla and Rajendranath Zutshi round out the supporting cast. Director Danny Boyle shot much of the film on location in Mumbai, working with a large ensemble of Indian actors alongside the British leads.
Context & significance
Released in 2008, the film became one of the more widely discussed British productions of its year, built around a structure that keeps cutting between a bright, high-stakes television studio and the much harder world Jamal grew up in. It pulled international attention toward a side of Mumbai rarely shown at that scale on screen, and its pairing of a game-show framework with a coming-of-age story became something other filmmakers referenced afterward. The romance between Jamal and Latika runs underneath the quiz-show plot for the full length of the film.
Watching Slumdog Millionaire on Ktime
Slumdog Millionaire is available on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers can watch it either way. Streaming starts as soon as you log into a K-Time account; the page itself is free to browse without one.