Born into Brothels

Composite Score: 81.33

Featuring: Zana Briski, Kochi, Avijit Halder, Shanti Das, Manik, Puja Mukerjee, Gour, Suchitra, Tapasi, and Mamuni

Directors: Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman

Writers: Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman

Genres: Documentary, Biography, News

MPAA Rating: R for some sequences of strong language

Box Office: $3.53 million worldwide

Why should you Watch This Film?

                Born into Brothels chronicles the lives of nine children living in the red-light district of Calcutta and their struggles to improve their lives with the help of photographer and filmmaker Zana Briski. The stories told are incredibly moving, and the skill and art displayed by the children are impressive. The winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2005 Oscars, Born into Brothels challenges the viewer to care for the poor and destitute and also paints a picture of the universality of the human condition through the words of the children whose stories it highlights.

Why shouldn’t you Watch This Film?

                The treatment of these children at the hands of the adults who are supposed to care for them can be particularly traumatic, especially for people who experienced abuse from parents and guardians at a young age. While an important part of the experience of these children and helpful for eliciting the compassion of the audience, it can be difficult to view for some. Be advised.

                Another difficult aspect of the film is its lack of closure for so many of the children’s stories. The film was made while the children were still children, so the end of their stories is left very much up to the imagination of the viewers. The final montage before the credits communicates the immediate follow-up to the events in each of the children’s lives, but even those little snippets leave more to be known and explored. While some of the featured children have hopes of better lives, it implies that seemingly a majority of the featured kids will not escape the lives of poverty, prostitution, and crime that they were, as the title says, born into. The ambiguity of the ending can be difficult to process, especially after investing an hour and a half into these children’s stories.

So wait, why should you Watch This Film?

                There is a dichotomy of hope and despair at play throughout this film, as the audience watches these ten children in Calcutta use photography to try and better their situations. Despair comes from the start as the audience is shown the poor living conditions in the red-light district and carries on for the remainder of the film in interviews with children who even say “there is nothing called hope” in their futures and in the looks at the children's families, with so many generations living in the same despondence, all hoping to get out but none yet having accomplished the goal. At the same time, there is hope shining through in the children’s interactions with one another and with “Zana Auntie” and eventually through her intervention in their lives. Briski seeks to enroll all of the children in programs that will increase their education, which they and she believe will improve their future opportunities. The photographs that the children take also reflect the same dichotomy. Bright colors and smiling faces are often contrasted with harsh images of poverty and struggle, sometimes even in the same photograph.

                The children’s skill at photography is itself a reason to watch the film. Throughout, the children’s photographs are featured in montages, exhibiting a photographical eye and talent that far surpasses most children under the age of thirteen. I was consistently impressed with each child’s featured portfolio, taken on cheap, early 2000’s cameras, that would still warrant a feature in many a photography studio.

                A film that challenges and pushes its viewers to action, Born into Brothels is a documentary that makes you want to help these children and others like them. It creates a sense of frustration with the systems that keep people in poverty for generations and with the mentality that becomes ingrained in people as a result – that seeking to better oneself is doomed to fail, so why try. There is condemnation, not of the lifestyle or of the necessity, but of the culture that created such hardship and the systems that keep it in place, making the story resonate beyond the streets of 2004 Calcutta into the 2020s in America and the rest of the world. The hope and despair of the story, the children’s abilities, and the resonance of the film all make it worth viewing for everybody.