Thanks Maa Movie Reviews

It is important to point out one fact that might help you view Thanks Maa with a totally different perspective. Irfan Kamal's film on slummy street kids was first screened at the International Film Festival at Goa in 2008. Which means, it was made before Slumdog Millionaire, the film that swept the world with its take on Indian kids who survive and succeed despite the mean streets of Mumbai.

Debutante director Irfan Kamal's THANKS MAA is not a no-brainer Bollywood film. It is gritty, courageous, realistic and hits you like a ton of bricks! SALAAM BOMBAY, TRAFFIC SIGNAL, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE and now THANKS MAA. The lives of the under-privileged street kids continue to attract storytellers across the globe. But THANKS MAA is different because it tells the journey of a street kid who goes on a mission to reunite an abandoned kid with his mother.

A street kid is answering the nature’s call in the open when two more join him for a common laxation act and strike an impromptu interrogation on the spot. But rather than repelling, the smutty scene keeps you riveted. This isn’t the usual crap that Bollywood serves you almost every week. Thanks Maa is no shitty business. Never since Salaam Bombay or Slumdog Millionaire have the street kids from Mumbai slums been portrayed more realistically and rivetingly in a feature film. All thanks to this maa of meaningful cinema.

You may not want to pay money to see this film. Thanks Maa has no stars, no foreign locations and little song and dance to speak of. Instead it has slum-kids stealing, shitting and speaking a filthy language, while hanging with shady characters in streets filled with addicts and garbage. Nothing pretty or made up, just life as it were, except that it’s on the other side of the tracks. The shittier side, most recently popularised worldwide by Slumdog Millionaire

After `Road, Movie’, this is the other movie releasing this week at home after gathering accolades on the international festival circuit. It’s been out there longer, since 2007, but it hasn’t made the story any less relevant : `Thanks, Maa’ is about a bunch of spunky street kids in Mumbai, and the gigantic odds they have to wrestle with just to exist. This is a film hard to watch, but it is a film that needs to be watched. Pity it’s come into theatres unpublicized.

Loose reels ramble on. And there’s just one observation you go back home with: the boy Shamsi (better known as Municipality), and his little buddies off the pavement. To begin with, they talk like street urchins. And not Dev Patel. It may be unfair to expect a kid to carry an entire movie on his weak shoulders. It still proves how the child – raw in innocence — is the father of the leading man. Adults ‘act’. Just watch veterans on the same show — Raghuveer Yadav, Alok Nath.... I’m glad the boy earned himself a National Award.

Thanks Maa is about a 12-year-old street kid who finds an abandoned newborn and takes it upon himself to reunite him with his mother. An abandoned child himself, Muncipality, played by Shams Patel who won a National Award for his performance, doesn't want another child to suffer the same fate. So he braves drug addicts, policemen, pimps and prostitutes to find the mother. His journey also becomes a portrait of Mumbai

Star cast: Shams Patel, four new street kids, Alok Nath, Raghubir Yadav, Ranvir Shorey. Plot: A young street urchi...