Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids (2004)
Red Light Films, HBO

Description

The most stigmatized people in Calcutta's red light district are not the prostitutes, but their children. In the face of abject poverty, abuse, and despair, these kids have little possibility of escaping their mother's fate or for creating another type of life.

In Born into Brothels, directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman chronicle the amazing transformation of the children they come to know in the red light district. Briski, a professional photographer, gives them lessons and cameras, igniting latent sparks of artistic genius that reside in these children who live in the most sordid and seemingly hopeless world.

The photographs taken by the children are not merely examples of remarkable observation and talent; they reflect something much larger, morally encouraging, and even politically volatile: art as an immensely liberating and empowering force.

Devoid of sentimentality, Born into Brothels defies the typical tear-stained tourist snapshot of the global underbelly. Briski spends years with these kids and becomes part of their lives. Their photographs are prisms into their souls, rather than anthropological curiosities or primitive imagery, and a true testimony of the power of the indelible creative spirit.

Tags

2000s, Poverty, Sundance award winner, Oscar winner, India, Prostitution

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Salon.com | Andrew O'Hehir

Filmmaker Ross Kauffman (who co-directed with Briski) creates such memorable images out of squalid surroundings that I sometimes wondered whether I was being distracted from the devastating stories of these kids by the beautiful cinematography.
Read full review (Cinema)

10 Austin Chronicle | Marjorie Baumgarten

Born Into Brothels is a devastating portrait of impoverished Calcutta children who are born into the sex trades, yet the film is also an inspiring document about human possibilities and the need to strive despite impossible odds.
Read full review (Cinema)

10 DVD Times | Noel Megahey

The film uses the children to show the true nature of their circumstances, but it doesn’t exploit them, taking the time to understand their true nature and sense of worth and using the photographs they take to demonstrate the qualities that can be derived by investing them with time, education and opportunities.
Read full review (DVD)

9.2 The Onion A.V. Club | Nathan Rabin

As empathetically captured by Briski and co-director Ross Kauffman, the kids are a riveting combination of hardboiled world-weariness and radiant, childish joy. Surprisingly articulate and insightful, they're jaded miniature adults one moment, gleeful scamps the next.
Read full review (Cinema)

9.0 New York Times | A. O. Scott

Rather than simply record the lives of those children, Zana Briski, a New York-based photojournalist who is one of the film's directors (along with Ross Kauffman), became their teacher and their advocate. They, in turn, started out as her subjects and became her collaborators. The resulting film is moving, charming and sad, a tribute to Ms. Briski's indomitability and to the irrepressible creative spirits of the children themselves.
Read full review (Cinema)

9.0 San Francisco Chronicle | Carla Meyer

Set in Calcutta's red-light district, where 10-year-old girls worry about being sold by their fathers, the film might have gone for the water works. But "Brothels,'' an Academy Award nominee for best documentary, favors a clear-eyed pragmatism befitting its unforgiving milieu.
Read full review (Cinema)

9.0 DVD Verdict | Jonathan Weiss

. This is one powerful documentary that will leave an indelible impression on you long after the screen goes dark. If you are not left with the undeniable impression that one person can make a difference in the lives of others then you need to sit back and press play one more time.
Read full review (DVD)

8.8 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

Zana Briski, an American photographer, and Ross Kauffman, her collaborator, went to Calcutta to film prostitution and found that it melted out of sight as they appeared. It was all around them, it put them in danger, but it was invisible to their camera. What they did see were the children, because the kids of the district followed the visitors, fascinated. Briski hit upon the idea of giving cameras to these children of prostitutes, and asking them to take photos of the world in which they lived.
Read full review (Cinema)

8.8 Old School Reviews | John Nesbit

Born into Brothels becomes much more than a mere documentary—it develops into a cause since any notoriety gained can translate into scholarships and hope for a handful of kids that otherwise are condemned to "join the line" as their mothers have done.
Read full review (Cinema)

8.0 Amazon user reviews

Be prepared when watching this documentary for strong language, and powerful imagery in the guise of simple statements like, "I have no hope" along with the knowledge that some of these children will not leave the red light district despite the help they are being given by Zana and Ross.
Read full review (DVD)

8.0 efilmcritic.com | Beth Gilligan

Born into Brothels is ultimately a testament to the transformative power of art. Training their eye through the camera’s lens, the children learned to see their own world differently and began to dream about other possibilities for themselves.
Read full review (Cinema)

8.0 filmcritic.com | Chris Barsanti

Episodic and drenched in realism, as opposed to the overly structured and simplistic narrative often thrust upon documentaries about people leaving in desperate Third World circumstances, Born Into Brothels is an inspirational work that still keeps its head on its shoulders.
Read full review (Cinema)

7.5 PopMatters.com | Cynthia Fuchs

While Born into Brothels sometimes seems to be making the kids' seeming "otherness" into art, their words and their work keep focus. Poised, knowing, and incredibly energetic, they are repeatedly forced to make difficult and very adult decisions.
Read full review (Cinema)

6.0 The Guardian | Peter Bradshaw

It has real insights, not so much into material poverty, but status. Simply, with a camera in their hands, these children had a taste of what it is like to control and understand one's surroundings, to feel some of the prestige and respect that prosperous westerners take for granted.
Read full review (Cinema)