Slumdog Millionaire vs. the favelas of Brazil

Last week I went to see the movie Slumdog Millionaire with others who work here at the Lighthouse Community Center. As we work with community development here in the slum, we were all interested to see how this movie portrayed the slums of India. It came out later here than it did in the US...so I will have to jog your memory if you saw it a couple of months ago!

The first thing that caught my attention was the title in Portuguese. Now, it is fairly normal for movie titles to change significantly when translated. But the question is always why. In Portuguese, the movie is called "Quem quer ser milionario?" or "Who wants to be a millionaire?" A literal translation of the title would have been "Favelado milionario." Why change the title in this case? I think it is an issue of marketing here, that those who can pay to go to the movies wouldn't have their interest drawn if the world "favelado" (a derrogatory term for someone from the slum/favela, much like "slum dog") was part of the title.

Rich and middle class Brazilians are able to see a movie like this that shows what life is like in slums in OTHER parts of the world, but the fact is that they would rather turn a blind eye to similar conditions that exist here in Brazil. Including the term "favelado" in the title would make that connection to the similar conditions here, and most Brazilians don't want to watch a movie that is about a favelado, because of the prejudices that exist against favelados here.

There are some key differences between the slums depicted in the film and those here in Brazil, or at least the one that I live in, known as Cafezal, which is part of a community of slums that makes up what is called the Conglomerado da Serra, like the conglomerate slums of the mountain ridge. The government has invested in the slum here in the past twenty years, to provide basic sanitary living conditions, such as sewage systems, running water, electricity, paved roads, and so forth. In times of heavy rain certain smells can result that make me question the sewage system's efficacy, but it is nothing like what was portrayed for bathroom systems in the film! Thank God! Just as in all Brazil, we cannot flush toilet paper down the toilet, but that is about as rough as it gets.

Yet many of the problems portrayed in the film exist here as well. While the government has succeeded in improving basic living conditions, it has not been able to address the social problems of the slum. Drug lords hold a tremendous amount of power, controling certain territories. Kids often get sucked into the drug trade due to lack of other ways to climb the social ladder. Many kids find creative ways to supplement the family income, such as perform tricks at busy street intersections to get money. Those who are vulnerable are easily taken advantage of, just as in the film.

Perhaps the biggest similarity goes back to the term favelado or slumdog and the accompanying prejudices. The gameshow host said shockingly rude things to Jamal when he was competing, belittling him on national television, because of his background growing up in the slum and his current job serving tea. The idea passed is that a slumdog is stupid, ignorant, incapable of the functions of higher society, and basically destined to remain at the bottom in the slumdog kind of life. Jamal is treated in a dehumanizing way simply because of where he is from. It is even assumed that he cheated because he knew the answers and there is no way someone from the slum could do better on the show than an upperclass, highly educated person.

Similar prejudice exists against "favelados" here. Kids who grow up in the favela are told that they are no good, stupid, slum trash. Some of our group leaders witnessed this last year as they took the kids in their group on a fieldtrip to the zoo, where some schools had also taken kids on a fieldtrip. One of the school teachers made a derrogatory comment about the kids in the group referring to them as "favelados" and the kids were very upset by it. They are not too bothered by the term favela, or to say they live in a slum, but the word favelado carries a much stronger meaning with it.

The problem comes when kids internalize the labels others place on them. When they are told they are just favelados and are destined to repeat the same kind of life in the slum that those before them lived, most start to believe it. When they believe it, it can turn into self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't know if their is anything sadder than seeing kids start believing these sorts of things about themselves - a big part of the work we do here is restoring a healthy self-image that society has done so much to destroy, to help kids see themselves through God's eyes rather than society's.

It is so sad that society treats people in this dehumanizing way, that it can treat a group of people as if they are less than human, as if they are trash. I am convinced that this outrages God, who created man in His own image, to see that image being so defiled. As Christians I believe it is our responsibility to fight against these oppressive societal structures that make human beings out to be trash, to restore humanity to those it has been taken away from.