"Born Into Brothels"; Smithsonian Magazine

[Guest guest]

, "msbauju" <msbauju> wrote:

> [....]

> http://www.bornintobrothels.com

> http://www.johnmcdowell.net

 

 

 

Young Eyes on Calcutta

By Andrew Curry

Smithsonian Magazine

May, 2005

 

British documentary filmmaker Zana Briski and collaborator Ross

Kauffman's Academy Award winning documentary chronicles the

resilience and vision of children in a Calcutta red-light district.

 

Full article:

http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues05/may05/calcutta.h

tml

 

On a trip to Calcutta in 1997, Zana Briski visited the Sonagachi

neighborhood, the oldest and largest red-light district in Calcutta.

[….] Over the next two years the British-born photojournalist kept

going back to get closer to the prostitutes and brothel owners whose

lives she hoped to document.

 

As Briski worked, she was surprised that children—most of them sons

and daughters of prostitutes—would surround her, fascinated by her

camera. So she started teaching them to take pictures, setting up

weekly classes and giving them cheap, point-and-shoot cameras with

which to experiment. Their snapshots—arresting portraits of their

families, each other and the surrounding streets—capture a chaotic

world as few outsiders could.

 

[….] But teaching photography wasn't enough. Briski plunged full time

into trying to help several of the kids get into private schools—all

the while videotaping her efforts and their struggles. For two years

beginning in 2002, Briski and New York-based filmmaker Ross Kauffman

shot 170 hours of video of the children. [….]

 

This past February, the resulting documentary, Born into Brothels,

added an Academy Award for Best documentary feature to its more than

20 other awards, including the Audience Award at the Sundance Film

Festival. New York Times critic A. O. Scott called the 85-minute

film "moving, charming and sad, a tribute...to the irrepressible

creative spirits of the children themselves." [….]

 

Briski and Kauffman, to preserve the subjects' anonymity, have chosen

not to screen the film in India, [….]

 

For children in Sonagachi and other Indian brothels, the cycle of

poverty and prostitution is difficult to break. According to India's

National Human Rights Commission, hundreds of thousands of Indian

women work as prostitutes; some Indian aid organizations place the

estimate as high as 15.5 million. Almost half of them began working

as children. "The numbers have gone up and the ages have gone down,"

says Ruchira Gupta, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker who in 1997

founded Calcutta-based Apne Aap Women Worldwide to help Indian

prostitutes. Gupta says brothel owners and pimps often press young

women to have babies, making them more financially dependent on the

brothel. "When mothers die of AIDS or other diseases," Gupta

adds, "their daughters are immediately brought in." [….]