To celebrate our tenth anniversary, we asked Film Streams staff and board members to pick their top ten from the more than 1,600 films that illuminated the screens of the Ruth Sokolof Theater during its first decade. What emerged was a series that champions some of the finest independent and foreign films released in the last ten years.
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE certainly took Film Streams by storm. One of our first major “hit” films, the stunning story of Jamal — his family, his romance, and serendipitous moments transported the Omahan audience to the streets of Mumbai. In the rest of the country, the film was making a similar impact. The film became a national hit, culminating in a joyful Best Picture win at the 2009 Academy Awards.
Director Danny Boyle spoke to Newsweek about the universal appeal of the film, as well as its tried and true story form, “When I asked Simon Beaufoy, the writer of the script, what it was like writing it, he said, ‘You can’t escape the shadow of Dickens, dealing with these extremes within an extraordinary city.’ He felt the shadow of Dickens on him the whole time. The tone shift, where you shift from high comedy to moral horror to an exhilarating dance sequence at the end — people think we put that in to give it a commercial, feel-good ending. The truth is that if we left out the dance it would have been a really imperfect picture of the city, because it’s such a part of the city, the instinct of the city. That’s why it had to be in the film. The only question was whether we put it in the middle or the end. So yeah, Dickensian — it’s very, very true. He’s the master storyteller, and you follow his lead in having confidence to slam such extremes next to each other in a film and risking such vast variations of tone. It shouldn’t work — the rule book says you can’t shift tone like that constantly — but it does.”
