Shwaas (2004)

While the film sometimes plays like an hour TV medical drama padded to reach feature length, Sawant achieves touching, naturalistic performances from a fine ensemble cast.

An old-fashioned soaper that will please or not, depending on a viewer's tolerance for schmaltz.

Mr. Sawant does his best to balance hopeful sentiment with the depressing prospect of a child's world going dark, and he tries to infuse this simple melodrama with a sense of tenderness and beauty.

Takes a potential hot-button premise -- the callous indifference of the Indian medical bureaucracy toward the lower classes -- and dramatizes it in the most shameless way possible.