CANNES - She heard the word “impossible” too often last summer. Directing a band of illiterate street kids for a film shot amid the cacophony of Bombay’s streets, brown-sugar dens, brothels and railways was too daunting a challenge, everybody said.

But the Indian filmmaker Mira Nair made the film so well that it was crowned with the Camera d’Or at last month’s Cannes film festival, an award that honors the best first feature film by a young director.

Salaam Bombay has since been shown at the Paris Cinematheque and will be in the New York Film Festival in October, it opens in Israel
in July and in France in August, and has been sold in Switzerland, Denmark, West Germany and Italy. It is the story of a 10-year-old boy named Krishna who comes to Bombay to earn money and becomes Chaipau, a word meaning,”one who delivers tea and bread,” in the red light district. As a vision of the jarring city life he confronts, the film is a deftly made work of neo-realism shot in resplendent colors.

Exceptionally, no studios or sets were used, with Bombay’s congested streets, alleys, railways and brothels serving as backdrops. In addition, the cast included only three professional actors, joined by a troupe
of ragpickers, street performers, bookies and coolies. Shafiq Syed,
who plays Chaipau, is himself a runaway from southern India who was working as a ragpicker on Grant Road Bridge. The obstacles to shooting the film were numerous. But the children learned the script by heart. Nair made a deal with the woman running the brothel (”Her business is at night; ours was during the day,” she says jokingly). And she gained the crowd’s solidarity by casting onlookers in the film, although she admits that controlling the 500 to 5,000 people clustered behind the camera during exterior shots was no easy task. What resulted was an authenticity that helped the children feel more comfortable, since they were immersed in environments paralleling
their own.

Nair’s desire for realism in the film is rooted in her earlier experience in making documentaries, which have often explored social customs in India. India Cabaret (1985), a short film about strippers in a Bombay nightclub, examined the contradictions of the patriarchal society, which both uses and ostracizes these women. According to Nair, it was a “controversial smash in India,” successful in Japan, Britain and
the United States, but boycotted by New York City’s WNET as not “appropriate” viewing. (WNYC later picked it up). Children of Desired Sex (1987) studied the dilemma pregnant women often confront
in India when amniocentesis reveals that the child they are carrying is female. They either abort, or face oppression as women who bear daughters in a society that puts a premium on being male.

Salaam Bombay, an Indian-French-British co-production, is about survival in a city where childhood is often a luxury. “I wanted to use my influence in documentary filmmaking to bring an authenticity to the screen that has rarely been used in Indian film –to use the streets, the texture, the fabric and the colors of the city, and in this situation to use primarily children of the streets playing themselves,” Nair said. “The maps of their faces, the experience that makes them – clearly they are children of a young age, but they are also ageless. They are children whose faces reveal the passage that has brought them to the city,” she added.Nair and the scriptwriter, Sooni Taraporevala, spent two months working with children in institutionalized children’s homes called chiller rooms (literally “small change” in Hindi), in prisons, and on the streets. Nineteen children were picked from more than 130 who came together in “workshops” where they improvised stories about their fives. They worked eight hours a day for six days a week, and were paid
daily. Despite the fact that none had watches and many had to travel great distances each day, the children always arrived on time. “It became obvious that the children, streetwise and tough as they were, had never had any place to go in their lives, and that this new intereset in them as human beings was something that was hugely welcomed,” Nair explained. “Through theatrical exercises, movement, dance, discussions about their lives and ultimately, improvisations on themes close to them (i.e. family life, running away, violence and cheating),
an atmosphere of give and take was created and the children came into their own. Our attitude toward the children was always one of meeting them halfway and learning from them.”

Nair, 31, had been an amateur actress in India before getting a scholarship to Harvard. Finding the local theater uninspiring at the time, she enrolled in a photography course (where she met her husband
and coproducer of the film, Mitch Epstein) and eventually stumbled onto filmmaking. “I discovered film and was inspired by it in America,” she said, “because in India we have really no easy tradition available
for studying cinema– at least when I was growing up there in the small town of Bhubaneswar in Orissa, a fairly remote eastern state south of Calcutta.” The daughter of a retired civil servant, she attended an Irish Catholic boarding school in Simla, an old British hill station in northern India, and went on to study at Delhi University before going to Harvard. Despite the stark portrayal of life in Bombay, the Indian government supported the making of the film.

“This film is clearly about life in a hard place,” Nair said. “But it is a film which ultimately celebrates the survival of these children rather than simply revealing the depression and misery of their existence–the fact that they find humor and resilience in any situation which ordinarily
you or I would consider impossible.