With a total of eight Academy Awards (including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director Danny Boyle), this movie is as far from a “slumdog” as it gets; its realistic portrayal of life in the slums of India captivated audiences and critics alike, and brought home the gold on Oscar night.

Slumdog Millionaire is the unlikely story of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a Mumbai-raised teen who wins the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and is then accused of cheating.

Just short of taking the grand prize of 20 million rupees, Jamal is locked up and interrogated by local police. In custody and desperate to prove his innocence, Jamal tells the story of his life—a painful saga of love, loss, violence and romance that also explains how he knows the quiz show answers.

Slumdog’s images of stark violence and colorful, contrived-for-TV excitement are set against a classic boy-meets-girl romance, and the performances are uniformly good, particularly Anil Kapoor as the wisecracking TV host and the luminous Freida Pinto as Jamal’s long-lost love, Latika.

Director Danny Boyle works with great felicity to capture Mumbai’s bustling street culture—barefoot children running through a maze of corrugated tin shacks, noisy snarls of traffic, brilliantly colored saris bursting from the frame. Slumdog flirts between fairy tale and gritty documentary; it feels both authentic and hyper-real.

Here’s a movie to savor for its salute to hope amid hopeless circumstances, love despite the odds and the inextinguishable spirit that drives some people to transform their lives. The feel-good ending could tease a smile out of the most hardened cynic, and the all-star Bollywood dance finale should send you away singing.

By Aysa Melkonyan