The first of our nine texts is the 2008 multi-award winning, multi-lingual, multi-genre box office smash; Slumdog Millionaire.
The links below will take you to the powerpoints used for the lessons taught about Slumdog Millionaire. If there are any video clips on the presentations they may feature beneath.
Remember that the lessons must be used in conjunction with the notes you've made during the lesson. However, feel free to comment after the powerpoint based on any ideas you have.
- Lesson 1: Background/Context & Production
- Lesson 2: Distribution, Marketing & Promotion
- Lesson 3: Genre Vs Auteur theory
- Lesson 4: Genre Influences
- Lesson 5: Representation
- Lesson 6: Narrative Structure
- Lesson 7: Appeals of the film
- Lesson 8: Responses and Success
The 'Movie' takes you to the note taking guidance.
The Exam/Essay plans is a quick link to the plans that feature at the end of the lessons.
Why Slumdog?
As you'll see from the resources uploaded to this site and as you become more aware of the requirements of the exam it becomes obvious that Slumdog Millionaire is a perfect text to study for the MS4 exam.
Apart from being an extremely likeable and thoroughly entertaining movie that has something for everyone, Slumdog was a huge success pretty much against all odds. The notion of a film set in India, with an all (but one) Indian cast, a third of which is subtitled and which tackles issues of child torture and child prostitution does not sound like the most commercially viable product and yet the movie won more than one hundred awards and took hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide at the box office.
From that perspective alone Slumdog is worth studying.
It's also a mashed up hybrid of different genres and unconventional storytelling which obviously makes it interesting to us from a textual analysis point of view. Throw in the variety of different representations that can be explored and you soon start to realise that we could study this film for the entire year!
Like all movies, there are various stories and interesting facts regarding the background, the production and the life of this film after it was made - just dipping into some of the resources linked to this page will make your head burst at the seams.
Go through the lessons, read through the resources, make notes, practice the exam questions.
Know this film, it is your destiny!
