It is the most talked-about British film in years – a spectacularly over-the-top fusion of Hollywood and Bollywood, with a setting in the slums of Mumbai that has proved to be extraordinarily topical.

Of all the British contenders in the Golden Globes ceremony on Sunday – among whom are Kristin Scott Thomas, Kate Winslet, Rebecca Hall, Sally Hawkins and Emma Thompson – it is Slumdog Millionaire that could win the biggest prize of the night, stealing the Best Picture gong from Brad Pitt’s overly earnest three-hour fantasy of a man who ages in reverse, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Hype surrounding Slumdog is so intense that it took no fewer than five gongs at the Critics’ Choice Awards on Thursday, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writer.

And yet 9,000 miles away from Hollywood in Mumbai, the director Danny Boyle’s tale of a boy from the slums becoming perilously successful on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (the script was adapted from the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup and the film was co-produced by Celador Films, the company that owns the rights to the show) remains virtually unknown.

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In Dharavi, home to a million Mumbains, the owner of one of the many illegal backroom cinemas had to think long and hard when asked if he had ever heard of it.

“No,” he said, finally, scratching at his string vest before expressing surprise and some degree of bafflement that the film was set in his neighbourhood and had been hailed as a masterpiece by critics overseas.

“Is it an action movie?” he asked.

“We mostly like action films. If it’s got lots of action, we might consider showing it.” The cinema owner, who would give his name only as Mr Alangur, gestured inside his tiny lobby to where a boy was pasting on to the mottled plaster a freshly photocopied poster for Blade 2, a vampire film from 2002. He said that it had done very good business last week, in spite of the economic downturn.

In truth, of course, critics have struggled to identify the precise genre of Slumdog, which is up for a Globe with another British film, In Bruges, which is about two Irish hitmen on holiday in Beligum. In Bruges was nominated for Best Comedy or Musical.

In the same way that Mr Boyle’s 1996 film Trainspotting made heroin addiction in Edinburgh seem almost chic, Slumdog makes squalour in Mumbai seem almost romantic.

The film includes a Bollywood-style song-and-dance routine and a third of it is in Hindi, with English subtitles.

In spite of this, the film broke records in terms of revenue per screen when it was released in the US in November.

All of which helps to explain its nomination in four categories at the Globes – Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score – and its status as a favourite to win an Academy Award in February.

The script tells the story of Jamal Malik, a fictional dirt-poor orphan who stuns India when he reaches the final level on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Jamal, played by Dev Patel, 18, a British actor from Harrow, North London, is suspected of cheating by the producers of the show.

The film is expected to be released in India on January 23, but it has yet to make it past the notoriously prickly censors in the country. Nevertheless, the distributors have already prepared a Hindi-dubbed version.

Broadly speaking, there are three types of cinema in India: the western-style multiplexes, with about 600 screens between them, catering to the wealthy middle class; the 7,000 traditional single-screen cinemas, still known as “talkies”, found throughout the country, and the so-called mini theatres in the slums. The latter cinemas, where tickets cost 20p and where films are played to tiny audiences on VHS, is where the Jamal Malik character in Slumdog would have watched films before being turned into an Indian folk hero for his astonishing run on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

The film will have to win over the likes of Mr Alangur if it is to enjoy the same kind of success.

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