Born into Brothels

Shutterbugs: Born into Brothels gives the camera to sex trade victims

By Jeannette Catsoulis

While fiction films normally receive Academy Awards based on artistic merit, documentaries are often expected to have some social utility before being deemed Oscar-worthy. It was no surprise to anyone, therefore, when Born Into Brothels received this year's award for Best Documentary Feature: its potent mix of children, sex and photogenic philanthropy was simply too perfect to ignore.

Uneasily treading the line between exploitation and missionary humility, Born Into Brothels documents the struggles of photojournalist Zana Briskie to obtain education for the children of Calcutta's red-light district. Having spent several years photographing the prostitutes and pimps, drug addicts and alcoholics who inhabit the region's moldering tenements, Briskie became close to their ragged, futureless children. To divert them from the squalor of their lives, she gave them cameras and encouraged them to photograph whatever interested them. The results were so riveting Briskie decided to film the project and use the proceeds to help the children escape the fate of their parents.

With co-director Ross Kauffman, Briskie shot over 170 hours of film over the course of 2 1/2 years, much of it heartbreaking. Though the beatings, burnings, and drug use go on all day, the children--like the film itself--possess a resilient energy. Curious and talkative, they fill the screen with their distinct personalities: the bright beauty of Manik, who "never bothers anyone"; the shyness of Kochi, a little girl who washes pots and runs errands for the whores; moody Avijit, whose eye for composition helps him win an international competition. Their photographs, filled with the narrow streets and fetid rooms and daily indignities of their lives, are surprisingly vibrant and vigorous--windows to spirits unquenched by their surroundings.

While Briskie the philanthropist fights to get the children's work auctioned off at Sotheby's and into an Amnesty International calendar, Briskie the filmmaker remains fully aware of the dramatic potential of her subject. Shooting in a kinetic, verité style, she fills the frame with the intimate horrors of poverty, lingering on a pair of snuffling rats and a naked toddler chained to a stoop (why, we don't know). Disquieting dissolves and ominous music accompany the more disturbing sequences, but most of the time her camera crouches at child's-eye-view, its frenzied movement mimicking the errratic rhythm of their days.

Moving, eye-opening, and occasionally ethically troubling, Born Into Brothels is difficult to shake off. Audiences will remember little Puja, fearlessly thrusting her camera in the faces of drug dealers and angry prostitutes, and beautiful Suchitra, rapidly approaching the age when she'll be expected to join her mother "in the line." "There is nothing called hope in my future," says Ojit, after his mother dies, and this amazing self-awareness is perhaps the film's most heart-wrenching aspect. "If I went somewhere and got an education, I wonder what I could become," muses 10-year-old Kochi. So do we.