Casual Critic Mini Reviews

Born into Brothels (India/USA) (HBO) (2004) ****1/2Year: 2004iMDB

Director: Zana Briski, Ross Kauffman

Born into Brothels is an honest documentary about the life of children born in the Calcutta Red Light District. Zana Briski started out trying to simply document life in the district, but as she grew attached to the children living there she changed her focus completely. As a photographer she started teaching photography classes to a group of kids and, at the same time, try to help them get admitted into better schools which would enable them to leave the neighborhood in which they could only have one future: the girls in the prostitute line, the boys becoming pimps or otherwise helping out with the women's "work".

The documentary uses the photographs taken by the children to show their potential, their outlook on life, and is commented mostly by the children themselves who tell their stories, their views about their future and their extremely mature outlook on life. Zana's fight to place the kids into schools is a difficult one given their background, and while things seem to finally work out at some point as she manages to convince some schools to accept a few of the kids and some families to let them go, the ending is as honest as the rest of the movie showing that some hurdles cannot be passed so easily and that "they lived happily ever after" type endings are not that common in real life.