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Born Into Brothels

Reviewed by Madelyn Miller the Travellady

Does it matter when you see a movie? Valentine’s Day was the wrong day to watch Born into Brothels.

Now it is not the movie's fault. The title certainly does not promise an uplifting romantic comedy. But the movie was so frustrating in the despair and hopelessness of the situation that it made the simple celebration I had planned with chocolate cheesecake and bubbly seem trivial.

Kind of like my mother telling me about the starving children in Europe, it was not pleasant to watch the utter impossibility of a future for the children in Born Into Brothels.  Because their parents are technically criminals in India, they are not eligible for education or benefits that are desperately needed. The only career path for girls seem have to look forward to is being sold into prostitution, working the line, as it is called.

But this is a review of the movie, not the situation. And the movie is dramatically done using the simple photos of the children and their lives since no one working in that area wants to be photographed.

Please be warned though, that even the few charming moments are sad.

Do not go see this movie on a bad day.

This is the story of a group of extraordinary children in Calcutta’s red light district.  Produced and directed by filmmakers Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, Born Into Brothels, which has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary, recently co-won the International Documentary Association’s Feature Film award along with Fahrenheit 9/11 and was named Best Documentary by both the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review. 

A tribute to the resiliency of childhood and the restorative power of art, Born Into Brothels is a portrait of several unforgettable children who live in the red light district of Calcutta where their mothers work as prostitutes. Briski, a New York-based photographer, gives each of these youngsters a camera and teaches them how to take pictures, simultaneously causing them to look at their world with new eyes.  Together with Kauffman, Briski captures the magical way in which beauty can be found in the most unlikely of places and how a bright and promising future becomes a possibility for children who previously had no future at all.

Touching and heartfelt, yet devoid of sentimentality, Born Into Brothels defies the tear-stained tourist snapshot of the global underbelly.  Briski spent years with these children and became a part of their lives. Their photographs are prisms into their souls, rather than anthropological curiosities, and a true testimony to the power of the indelible creative spirit.

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