Grand Salaam

When the documentarian Mira Nair set out to make her first fiction feature, she didn't take the easy road.

She scoured the streets and jails of Bombay for willing waifs, trained them in her own theater workshop, and then filmed their stories. The result, Salaam Bombay! (which should prove one of the hits of this month's New York Film Festival), is at once gentler and more exotic than its great predecessors, Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados and Hector Babenco's Pixote. Nair isn't as interested in the problem of evil among innocents as she is in the hectic, terrifying canvas they inhabit.

Salaam Bombay! is a painfully vivid portrait of gutter life in one of the most hellish cities on earth.

S.S.