Chanda Sharma in "Salaam Bombay!"

Chanda Sharma as Sola Saal/sweet sixteen in a scene from Salaam Bombay! Mira Nair's first full-length film, received, among other awards, the Golden Camera at the Cannes International Film Festival, France in 1988. It is a fiction film unique in many respects. Contrary to the traditional techniques used in Indian cinema, studios and film sets are left aside to take as a backdrop the streets, the platforms of the stations, brothels and alleys of the underworld of Bombay. It presents an aspect of Bombay unknown to the general public. It is the portrait of an omnipresent and hitherto impenetrable city (“Cinema del mundo” magazine).