Last night I was trolling around the web, reading up on the Academy Awards nominees. I found an article about “Slumdog Millionaire” the movie about a poor boy who grows up to become a contestant on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”  As I was reading about the movie, I clicked on a link about the controversies surrounding the film. One is that the movie is less a realistic view of poverty in India, and more an exploitative look at the country’s slums.

A columnist from Britain’s Times calls the movie “poverty porn” and writes: ” … the film is vile. Unlike other Boyle films such as Trainspotting or Shallow Grave, which also revel in a fantastical comic violence, Slumdog Millionaire is about children. And it is set not in the West but in the slums of the Third World. As the film revels in the violence, degradation and horror, it invites you, the Westerner, to enjoy it, too.”

Hmmm. I don’t know that I agree with that summation. In fact, I think using the term “poverty porn” is, in its own way, exploiting poor people for the sake of selling newspapers. But I can see how someone who watched the movie might have felt uncomfortable watching it.

When I went to see Slumdog, I took my parents, who are Sri Lankan immigrants. I had read something about how it was this year’s feel-good-movie-of-the-year, which made me think it would be uplifting and light compared to all the downers in the theaters right now. But uplifting wasn’t how I felt watching it. It was more like scared stiff for the characters, who you follow from their childhood into adulthood. The slums were dangerous, and the children were constantly escaping physical and emotional harm. Yes, the title tells you a bit about the eventual bright spot of the movie, but generally, it was tough to watch. After it was done, I looked at my parents and saw the startled look in their eyes. I don’t think they found it relaxing. I think they found it stressful. They had seen poverty in their own country, after all, and I don’t think I was providing much of an escape by taking them to see a microscopic view of it.

A few days after I watched the movie, I first witnessed some of the debate surrounding it on Facebook. Many friends had posted status updates about how they had just seen Slumdog, and they “LOVED” it. But a couple weren’t so happy. Something about the film and how it depicted poor people didn’t sit right with them.

All the back and forth got me thinking about how we at Oxfam communicate about the poor people we work with around the world. The people we talk to deal with real dangers, pain, and worry. Many of them live in homes and wear clothes that, to a Westerner, look fragile and dirty. But this is the reality of their lives. For us, the trick is to be true to what we see without undermining the inherent dignity of each person we meet. They don’t always have much in a material way, but they often have more of the elements of a high quality life – close-knit families, deep ties to their culture, indigenous knowledge, independence, and joy. Theresa Yaa Serwaah, a cocoa farmer I interviewed last year in Ghana, put it better than I ever could.  She said she’d rather reject payment from a gold mine rather than give up her family’s home and farm. “For us, development is not about having big, big things, but having your peace of mind. For us, development is about working for oneself and leaving something for the next generation,” she said.

It’s that spirit, that voice that we try to capture in our work. It’s brave words like Theresa’s, and photographs devoid of flies and bloated bellies. Poor people are just like us in many ways; they’re just trying their best to make a go of it. We hope relating the honest truth, not some stylized, overly dramatic version of it, motivates our constituents. If not, oh well. It’s not worth it to us to insult the very people we’re trying to help. So, in the end, I guess I’m happy that movies like Slumdog exist. Maybe they don’t always get it right, but at least they spur some important debate about poverty and how best to deal with it.