Slumdog Millionaire’s Child Actors Still Living in Squalor
Posted by Amber Robinson at 12:39 PM on January 28, 2009
Plucked from obscurity in the slums of Mumbai, Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail are the child actors who have melted millions of hearts as the young Latika and Salim in smash hit movie Slumdog Millionaire.
But according to their parents, the children have seen little reward for their roles in the film, which scooped the Golden Globe awards and is nominated for 10 Oscars.
As reported in the SMH, the film’s British director, Danny Boyle, claims to have 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 servants.
Rubina was paid $1060 for a year’s work while Azharuddin received $3600.
Both were found places in a free “English medium” school, usually attended by relatively poor children, and receive $42 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.
Given the success of the film, it quite shocking that the children are still living in slums. Yet is one movie role supposed to set kids up for life? Or does the experience count for something too?
Brandon Walters, who played Nullah in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, was reportedly paid $120,000 for his role in the film – a big sum for a child actor, but a tiny portion of the fee his co-stars Nicole Kidman or Hugh Jackman would have received. The money is already being swallowed up by exorbitant living costs in his home town of Broome, where the family car costs $160 a tank to fill up and good schools are expensive. The concern is that Brandon’s obvious talent may be overlooked by the lacklustre performance of the movie at the box office.
Meanwhile, Azharuddin is in fact worse off than he was during filming: of Slumdog Millionaire: 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 between fits of coughing.
“We feel that the kids have been left behind by the film. He should have been taken care of. We should have been taken care of. He is a hero of the film. He should have been taken to London. They have told us there is a trust fund but we know nothing about it and have no guarantees,” he said.
What responsibilities do you think film directors have towards struggling child stars?
The children are the responsibility of their parents, who should have seen to it that they got a better deal before signing on to do the film.
Let’s face it, when it comes to child welfare . . . it takes a village to take responsibility. Yes, their parents should have fought harder to get a better deal, Yes, the producers should have seen to it that the children had a fair contract but most of all, “Bollywood”, which has grown into one of the biggest . . if not THE BIGGEST film production center in the world should enact laws that protect child actors, require mandatory blocked trust accounts and limit working hours and conditions. I watched this film from many points of view. As a movie lover and film buff, I loved it. As a parent, I was mortified. As president of http://www.ChildrenInFilm.com, I was grappling to understand how they achieved many of those shots without jeopardizing the health, safety and welfare of the children involved. It was just a matter of time before stories like this started to emerge about this film.