On Location: The Home and the Street in Recent Films about Street Children

Abstract

More than twenty narrative films about street children have been produced in more than a dozen countries over the three decades since the UN International Year of the Child in 1979. This paper looks closely at seven of these films (Hector Babenco's Pixote, Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay!, Larry Clark's Kids, Nabil Ayouch's Ali Zaoua, Gerardo Tort's De la Calle, Siddiq Barmak's Osama, and Danny Boyle's and Loveleen Tandeen's Slumdog Millionaire), outlining a number of their recurrent themes and techniques, including the use of Neorealist principles of filming; the presence of screens in the profilmic space; the failure to complete traditional narratives; the abandonment by mothers; the staging of conditions of hunger, work, plenitude, and lack; the sexualisation of young people; and the rejection of institutional ‘homes’. The paper proposes that, collectively, the films demonstrate the impossibility of continuing to conceptualise childhood as a protected time and place of play and suggest the possibility that the street child is the emergent normative subject of global capitalism.