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My brothel's keeper
Two filmmakers both chronicle and try to help the children born to prostitutes and other shunned women in Calcutta in the moving documentary "Born into Brothels."
By MARIANA CARREÑO KING
Offoffoff.com
"The men who enter the building are not so good," states a 10-year-old girl speaking straight to the camera with disarming honesty. And so starts "Born Into Brothels," the new documentary by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, set in Calcutta's red district, or "The Line."
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As Briski explains at the start of the film, she went to India to photograph women — not necessarily prostitutes. She is then taken to Calcutta's labyrinthine red district where she is captivated by the many children running amok everywhere. She manages to get a room in "The Line," provides a handful of children with point-and-shoot cameras, gives them photography lessons and takes them on "photography trips" to the zoo and the beach. Under this premise, the film could have been teary-eyed and sentimental, but co-directors, co-producers and co-cinematographers Briski and Kauffman take the higher road: they let the children speak for themselves devoid of sentimentality, never portraying them or their families condescendingly.
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Mature beyond their years, the children talk just as easily about joining their mothers and sisters in "The Line" as they laugh and play with each other. Despite their chaotic reality (angry customers, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, poverty and misery), they manage to remain hopeful and even joyous. Learning how to take pictures allows them to explore their surroundings critically. Attesting to art's transformative power, they also learn to express themselves, to form their own opinions and to make their own choices, tools that were painfully unavailable to them before they learned how to operate a camera. The pictures they take are raw and powerful, but also playful. The contrast between their vitality and the grim reality is heartbreaking.
Briski and Kauffman raise the stakes even further, actually getting involved in the children's futures. Briski is convinced that the only way out of The Line for them is to attend boarding schools, a daunting endeavor. For starters, no boarding school would accept "children of criminals" — all of Briski's students are the sons and daughters of prostitutes, drug-dealers, pimps, etc. India's bureaucracy is also beyond comprehension; getting a birth certificate or a ration card can take months, if it happens at all. To raise money, they arrange exhibits of the children's photos in New York and Calcutta, to great success. But life takes other turns, too. Shortly after Avijit, a talented 12-year-old, is invited to Amsterdam by the World Press Photo Foundation, her mother is brutally murdered.
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Briski patiently weaves through India's bureaucracy and life on The Line, relentlessly trying to give these children a second chance. Her relationship with the children and their families grows stronger with each photography lesson, with each extracurricular activity such as the zoo, the market or the doctor. She never gives up and neither do the children. Briski even starts a foundation, Kids With Cameras, that continues to support the children and invites other photographers to embark in similar projects in other parts of the world (kids-with-cameras.org). At the end, not all the children in "Born Into Brothels" stay in school; and even those who do remain at risk today. But the filmmakers have won very important battles.
"Born Into Brothels" is an inevitably sad documentary, but it is also inspiring and beautiful to watch. It ought not to be missed.
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DECEMBER 8, 2004
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Reader comments on Born into Brothels:
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| • | Born in the brothel from Sophia Gawas, June 22, 2005 |
| | • | Re: Born in the brothel from Lydia Hinton, Sept. 26, 2005 |
| | | • | Re: Born in the brothel from Valare, Dec. 7, 2005 |
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| • | well from Ed, Nov. 26, 2005 |
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| • | a must see from Sandra Swieder, March 4, 2006 |
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| • | Amazing from Jen, Dec. 13, 2006 |
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| • | Born into brothels from Marie Van Hecke, April 2, 2007 |
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| • | Born in Brothels from Deborah H Wiseman, Aug. 21, 2007 |
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