Born Into Brothels

The soiled streets of Calcutta ought to be no place for children, but sadly the reality has limitless kids diminishing and falling through the gaps of society in our modern world. Those of us who live half a world away from the grunge, foulness, and vulgarity of the slums cannot fully know the experiences of the inhabitants or their children. We cannot know the ache, the terror, the misery, and the gloom of the average day in the red light district of Calcutta.

With Born Into Brothels, the 2004 Oscar-nominated documentary, we are shown that humanness can exist in the most depressing and distressed of circumstances. The filmmakers, Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, went to Calcutta to learn about and to film the lifestyles of the women who lived in the brothels. It wasn’t long before a more compelling story arose from the grime, as the children of these women, expected to exist in the dirt, emerged to the surface to breathe. Briski and Kauffman turned their attention and their cameras over to the kids and this brilliant documentary is the result.

Briski, an American photographer, found herself morally charged with the notion of providing some form of escape for the children of these prostitutes. She provided them with cameras to capture the world in which they lived, allowing a form of both escapism and confrontation behind the lens. The results are staggering, as we see the world underneath through the eyes of bright and charming kids.

Most of the children are amazingly capable and gifted. That is perhaps the most overwhelming aspect of Born Into Brothels, as we are faced with untutored, untouched children that still hold gifts of personality and wisdom that many educated, refined, “proper,” North American children lack. Perhaps life on the streets has been a forced education, as the process of avoiding a beating or chasing down money for dinner has provided more profound influence to the children than can be expected from any school or educational facility.

Through the eyes of the kids, we are able to see the pain and the squalor, but we are also able to see how desperately many of them cling to hope. Sadly, we are also able to see how quickly many of them can crumble into heaps of desolation and apathy.

With prostitution not a choice but rather a decided-upon way of life for many of the people in the red light district, most of the young girls we see simply lack a future. Prostitution is certainty; they will end up “on the line.” Yet the children remain buoyant, one way or another, in a world in which most of us would have long given up.

Born Into Brothels reminds us of optimism, but it also reminds us of the frantic cycle. While Briski and Kauffman are able to save some from their futures, there are countless others that are damned to their fate by cruel twist of being born in the wrong place. While individuals in North America argue over causes of poverty, the children in Calcutta and in similar regions are being beaten and turned into prostitutes. Would any of us dare look into the eyes of one of these precious children and actually blame them for their poverty?

A powerful, stirring documentary, Born Into Brothels will tell many of us what we already know. But for many others, it will illuminate a dreadful, disconcerting world in which the children simply exist. They have no choice, they do not live, and they do not even die. They are simply born into it.

Trailer: