Star Cast : Ranvir Shorey
Director : Irfan Kamal
Writer : Irfan Kamal
Cinematography : Ajay Vincent


A 12-year-old street kid named Municipality (Shams Patel), while on the run from the reformatory, finds and saves a two-day-old abandoned baby from becoming the prey to a ferocious street dog. Failing to find any takers among the people whom he deemed responsible and respectable, Municipality takes up the onus of finding the mother of that abandoned baby himself.

Before we can say ‘Hey Baby’ the narration quickly swerves away from the cute and schmaltzy aspect of find-baby-will-coochie-coo kind of feel-good cinema to show the gritty harsh reality of life on the relentless streets of Mumbai and how it toughens the tender ones real fast.

Director Irfan Kamal makes one helluva departure from convention .He cruises the crowded areas of Mumbai with an eye for stinging details. The festive population of Mohammed Ali Road on a Friday evening, the red-light areas with their sleazy bustle, the beachsides with gay and normal couples making out in the dark, the goons and touts, cabbies and pimps, bereaved mother and unfaithful husband, wanton women and kind men…the crowded canvas of Irfan Kamal’s film hints hectically at the savagely insensitive quality of life lived on the streets.


What Worked :

The jagged edges do not undermine the film’s unique and thoroughly unorthodox blend of realism and social message . While the veterans pitch in brave cameos that take the narrative forward to its heartbreaking conclusion, it’s the child actors who proudly occupy centre-stage.All of them are so in-character you wonder which came first, the slums or the camera!

The camerawork(Ajayan Vincent) and background score(Ranjit Barot) add an extra dimension to this heartwarming tale of an orphan who won’t let another newly-born suffer his fate.

What Didn't Work :

The film has its flaws , the most glaring being the constant struggle to keep the homeless children’s story credibly contoured on the bustling streets. In many sequences the young actor Master Shams can be seen carrying a doll instead of a baby. Also, because of the inherently dramatic nature of the theme some of the characters and situations lose self-control. The kinky sado-masochistic customer in the brothel is clearly not in-sync with the rest of the characters.

Some of the editing(Amit Saxena) is uneven.


Verdict : A classy street tale of belief, love and hope