“Hero! Hero!” A little boy
shouts from the top floor of a building in Calcutta’s
infamous red light district. He runs down the stairs
two at a time and out the door, where, waiting for him
is a shiny new bicycle— A Hero cycle, the bike he’s
always wanted but never dreamed he could own.
Photographer Zana Briski bought
the bike for Gaur, one of the children featured in the
film Born into Brothels after he translated for her
one day in class. However, if you’re looking for this
scene in the movie, don’t bother. It wasn’t filmed.
“We never did anything for
the film,” says co- director Ross Kauffman. “The film
was always secondary to the real work – trying to get
these children out of the brothels.”
Briski, who had worked in India
on stories of female infanticide and dowry death, was
immediately drawn to the women who worked in the brothels.
“I wanted to stay with them, live with them and understand
their lives,” she narrates in the opening sequence of
the film. “And of course, as soon as I entered the brothels
I met the children.” Renting a room in a brothel, she
stayed in the area off and on for about 2 years, gaining
the trust and confidence of the women and their children.
As she got to know the children
they expressed interest in learning photography.
“They wanted to learn how
to use the camera,” says Briski, “that’s when I thought
it would be great to teach them and to see this world
through their eyes.”
Briski bought some point and
shoot cameras and started giving photo lessons in the
brothel. From these photo lessons emerged the story
that would, one year later, form the heart of the film.
“The photography classes for
the children started as an experiment” says Kauffman.
“But the children were so good that Zana could actually
sell their photos and use the money to fund efforts
toward their education.” Briski ran photography classes
every Saturday and taught eight children from the brothels
how to compose, light, and look at the world through
a lens.
The film shows Briski and her
troupe of children on shoots, interspersed with images
of the photographs that they take on these jaunts through
their neighborhood and beyond. The children also speak
in brief interviews about their hopes and fears. “If
I could get an education I wonder what I could become,”
says Kochi wistfully. As she washes pots and pans and
carries buckets of water up flights of stairs, Tapasi
remarks matter-of-factly, “one has to accept life as
being sad and painful, that’s all.” The hard lives of
these children form the backdrop against which their
joy and enthusiasm for taking pictures is juxtaposed.
Although the interviews serve to highlight the children’s
personal situations, the buoyancy of the film comes
from watching their individual aesthetic and particular
proclivities develop through their work. By looking
at their photographs and contact sheets we get a sense
of their unique personalities. “I take pictures to show
how people live,” says Manik, a ten year old in the
group. “That’s why I like photography. I want to put
across the behavior of man.”
In a Garry Winogrand moment
the children go on a shooting trip to the zoo and stare
at the animals in captivity. The pictures they make,
of haunted animals gazing through the bars, are telling
of their own situations. They talk with sensitivity
about each other’s lives but are unable to think of
alternatives.
Puja, a child with an impish
smile and an irrepressible sense of humor laughs as
she describes the quirks of the team, “Kochi is shy
with the camera. Avijit gets upset when anyone calls
him fat.” The children are revealed as a group that
genuinely cares for each other. With little stability
in their home lives, they come together and form a strong
unit that supports each other even as they tease and
laugh at themselves and their fellow photographers.
“One day I went to Puja’s house and saw her dad beat
up her mom,” says Manik. “I wish I could take her away
from here. When she grows up she will end up on the
street.”
The film is structured around
Briski’s efforts to get the children out of the brothels.
The guiding force behind the film is Briski herself.
“Zana was getting more involved with helping the kids,
and through her struggles a story was emerging” says
Kauffman. “Zana had to tell the story. She was creating
it.” Briski approaches various schools, where she is
told that no one would take the children of sex workers.
“They have absolutely no opportunity without education,”
laments Briski. “The question is can I find a good school
that will take children of prostitutes.”
Briski is shown navigating
the complicated hierarchy of Indian bureaucracy, trying
to push paperwork through unwilling government officials
who regard her with varying degrees of incredulity.
One of the children shows remarkable promise and is
invited to present his work in Amsterdam. Getting a
passport for him proves nearly impossible.
These struggles, telling in
themselves, reveal a harsher reality about the lives
of these kids. As children of prostitutes, and therefore
criminals, they are among the most disenfranchised in
India. Without papers they are invisible, and can never
rise above their circumstances. This is why Briski’s
struggle to legitimize the children in the eyes of the
law is so remarkable. With someone on their side these
children can have hope for a future that does not involve
prostitution.
“You should feel very proud,”
says a photographer from New York, explaining to Avijit’s
grandmother that her grandson has been selected to go
to Amsterdam. “If you are pleased, so are we,” smiles
the grandmother, humoring this white man from America.
In the hermetic world of life in this Calcutta brothel,
photography is child’s play, a luxury that only the
rich can take afford to take seriously. But for these
eight children, their photography is the ticket to a
world beyond the claustrophobic life in the red light
district. “Please drive slowly,” Avijit instructs the
cab driver imperiously on the way to the airport. “I
won’t get there if there’s an accident. I won’t fulfill
my dreams.”
Their home life is shown without
sentimentality, but also without judgment. We watch
as the children are cursed at and curse back, watch
their fathers drink and do drugs and occasionally choke
up as they admit that they do not see a life for themselves
outside of the brothel. “In our room there is a rod
and from there we close the curtain, that way we don’t
see anything that’s going on,” says one of the children.
Their mothers come across as harsh and do not show much
tenderness towards their children. “If there’s one thing
I regret about the film,” Kauffman admits, “it’s that
it doesn’t show how much the mothers really do love
their kids. They just have a really hard time.”
In fact, the strongest mother
figure in the film is Briski herself as she takes the
children to interviews at various schools, accompanies
them to the doctor for blood tests and, through her
photography classes, teaches them a new way of looking
at their world.
Beautifully shot and tautly
edited Born into Brothels is not only moving emotionally,
but also artistic and well articulated. The film, although
centered around Briski’s photography classes, gains
momentum from the children themselves. They are a force,
and under Briski’s stern guidance they blossom into
artists, able to critique their work and articulate
their choices.
This blossoming is what makes
the film an inspiring story of finding immense untapped
creative potential in the most unlikely of places. Showing
these children their own power and enabling them to
create, for themselves, a bigger world is the greatest
gift that Briski can give. And it is ultimately this
gift and its transformative power that breathes life,
vibrancy and spirit into this work.
Briski and Kauffman shot one
hundred and seventy hours of footage that would subsequently
be edited down into its current, compact eighty-three
minute cut. The film took over three years to make.
Funding didn’t come in until halfway through the film.
Briski and Kauffman dated for six years – and broke
up a year and a half into making this film. Both made
sacrifices:
“Zana sacrificed her photography for three and a half
years to work with the children,” says Kauffman. “She
needs to go take pictures again.”
Kauffman seems weary, as, hunched over a Caesar salad
at Time Café in New York, he talks about the year-long
edit. “The biggest challenge for me in editing the film
was striking a balance between Zana and the kids,” he
says, “keeping it about the kids but having Zana tell
the story was really the hardest part.” But his eyes
light up as he acknowledges, “People feel really good
after watching the film.”
Part of that comes from the
children’s infectious enthusiasm and innate good nature
that form the heart of the film. Part of it comes from
Zana Auntie and Ross Uncle as they are called and their
love and respect for the children. Part of it comes
from watching the children prowl their familiar landscape
with new intentions and a new vision, camera in hand.
But the sum of this film is greater than its parts.
This film is a force because it takes on a life of its
own. The filmmakers, the children, their mothers and
grandmothers all work in concert and reveal the hand
of a greater entity that brought all these characters
together to create a beautiful work of life.
“This is a good picture …
we get a good sense of how these people live,” says
Avijit, critiquing work at the World Press Photo forum
in Amsterdam. “And although there is sadness in it,
and although it’s hard to face we must look at it. Because
it is truth.”
This eloquence is a leitmotif
in the film. The children are, through their art, encouraged
to assess their lives, by looking at them through the
lens of an outsider. At the conclusion of the film,
although not all the children are out of the brothel,
one gets the sense that their lives are just a little
bigger, and that their children will surely have a greater
hope for the future because of it.
Early on in the film, Puja
shows a contact sheet to her grandmother. “Look closely,”
she commands, handing her a magnifying glass. “Close
one eye and open the other and look!” These words embody
the spirit of the film and of Briski’s work. Through
teaching the children how to look at their world, it
teaches us how to look at ours as well. To look at our
world as a place where people can, and do, make a difference.
Winning the Documentary Audience
Award at Sundance 2004, Born into Brothels is now playing
at festivals nationally and internationally. HBO has
picked it up for a broadcast premiere. The film plays
in New York City in June as part of the Human Rights
Watch Film Festival. One place it won’t play is in India
and Bangladesh, a promise made by the filmmakers to
the families to protect them from reprisals. Briski
has set up a fund for the children called Kids with
Cameras. More information on the fund and screening
information is available on their website at: www.kids-with-cameras.org
BORN INTO BROTHELS
A FILM BY ZANA BRISKI AND ROSS KAUFFMAN
COPYRIGHT RED LIGHT FILMS
2004
Sanjna
N. Singh is a writer, producer and director and currently
works at HBO studios. She founded Chai Break Films in
2003 with a fellow Bryn Mawr graduate and they were
awarded grants from the New York State Council for the
Arts and the Experimental TV Center for their work Out
of Status, an independent documentary, which follows
four Muslim families detained or deported in post 9/11
immigration roundups.Her writing has been published
in NY Times among other publications and she was a panelist
at Amnesty International USA's Annual General Meeting
in 2004. Singh recently interviewed Ross Kauffman, co-director
of the film Born into Brothels which won an Oscar.
