‘Salaam Bombay!’

Mira Nair’s assured and passionate 1988 film, a fiction with its roots in the bitter truth, takes us into the fevered world of Bombay’s street children and celebrates their survival as an ongoing wonder. Nair reveals a wonderful eye, a truly cinematic sense of story and a fierce insistence on truth in managing, as Truffaut did with “The 400 Blows,” to lift us beyond her Oscar-nominated film’s pain to a compassionate understanding. Shafiq Syed (pictured) (Bravo Wednesday at 12:30 p.m.).