(UNDATED) You need to see “Slumdog Millionaire.”

It’s already won 49 awards, including best picture nods from the Golden Globes and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. It has 10 Oscar nominations, including best picture. Will it win? It should.

I saw “Slumdog Millionaire,” a British film about India, in Ireland and was consumed by memories of Brazil and El Salvador. That’s why it is so good. “Slumdog” may start in Mumbai, but it doesn’t end there.

British and Indian media argue whether the film portrays the recent changes in Mumbai properly (or improperly), if the child actors were plucked from the slums and paid poorly (or well), and how the film presents a genuine (or fairy tale) ending.

But the film, at its core, belongs not to the sad and steaming slums of India any more than it belongs to the heartbreaking favelas of Brazil or the open-sewer streets of El Salvador. Its story and, more importantly, its back story, transcend locale and land squarely in the heart of the viewer.

The film tells the story of an 18-year-old orphan named Jamal (Dev Patel) who works as a “chaiwala” — a tea server — in an Indian call center. As the film opens, Jamal is just one question away from winning 20 million rupees on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”. The buzzer sounds, signaling the end of the episode, and Jamal is let out the stage door to the waiting arms of police who accuse him of being a cheat.

As the interrogation proceeds, flashbacks of Jamal’s life explain how he learned the answers to the questions. We see his poverty and sense his childhood dreams. We watch in horror as his Muslim mother is murdered by Hindu rioters. We avert our eyes as the Mumbai version of Dickens’ Fagin puts out a young boy’s eyes because blind beggars earn more. We feel Jamal’s deep anguish as his slightly pathological older brother manipulates him and brings him heartbreaking losses.

Sophisticates may pooh-pooh the claim that you endure a thousand emotions during the film’s 120 minutes. The surface story is simple: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, boy loses girl again, boy tries anything to find girl, even appearing on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Yet there is nothing superficial about what is portrayed in the background. It is not soap-opera drivel; it is cast-iron reality of slum life. It is a recollection and depiction of pride, envy, anger, greed, sloth, lust, and gluttony in Technicolor. One is grateful there is no smell-o-vision.

The questions raised by the film creep beyond the edges of the movie and beyond the boundaries of Mumbai. I have not been to India, but I’ve seen the favelas of Sao Paulo and the slums of San Salvador. There is hope in the eyes of some of the poor that outshines the dead-eye look of those hopeless poor who have succumbed to crushing poverty, indifference, and ignorance. That glimmer of hope in the eyes of some slum dwellers flashed in my mind as I watched this film, and flashes even now.

The film, you see, is not simply about a kid winning a lot of money, getting the girl and everyone living happily ever after. The film is about the fact that money means nothing — literally, nothing — compared with life and human dignity.

Go see it.

(Phyllis Zagano is a Fulbright Fellow in Religious Studies at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland. She also holds a research appointment at Hofstra University.)