Slumdog Millionaire

Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire swept the 2009 Academy Awards with eight wins, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay (for Simon Beaufoy, adapting Vikas Swarup's novel Q&A), Best Cinematography (Anthony Dod Mantle), Best Film Editing, Best Original Score and Best Original Song for A. R. Rahman's Jai Ho, the first Indian composer ever to take the Oscar in the category, sharing the song award with lyricist Gulzar.

The film almost didn't reach cinemas. Warner Independent Pictures, the original American distributor, was being shut down by its parent company at the time of the film's completion, and the film was briefly headed for direct-to-DVD release before Fox Searchlight stepped in to acquire it for theatrical distribution. The cast was assembled from open castings in Mumbai and London (Dev Patel had been working on the British TV series Skins when he was cast) alongside Anil Kapoor, Madhur Mittal, Freida Pinto, Irrfan Khan and a group of child actors recruited directly from the Dharavi slum.

The film was shot largely on location in Mumbai by Anthony Dod Mantle on a mix of 35mm and Silicon Imaging digital cameras, at the time an unusual technical hybrid that won him the Oscar. Cinema studies departments now teach the film both as one of the highest-profile examples of Western-led representation of Indian urban poverty (with its attendant ethical debates) and as the precise moment Bollywood imagery and Hindi-language storytelling fully entered mainstream Western awards consideration.