Running Red Lights

Was anybody expecting Million Dollar Baby to sweep the Academy Awards? Once Clint Eastwood's euthanasia drama won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor, a consensus began to emerge in the media that Academy voters went sentimental this year. It was even suggested in some quarters that said sentimental streak extended to the Best Documentary category.

But anyone who actually saw Born Into Brothels, from the inaugural audience at Sundance to the critics screening it for this week's wide theatrical release, knows that there is little mushiness in the film.

"I don't think it is a sentimental film at all," says filmmaker Zana Briski. "I think it's a really honest film about these kids in the red-light district, and it shows everything from their joy and humor and beauty to the really harsh reality of their lives. I would not describe the film as sentimental, although I would describe it as a love story. I think it really is filled with love."

Despite Briski's insistence, the film is touching when not heart-wrenching in its depiction of the Calcutta children's plight. Co-directed by Briski and Ross Kauffman, Born Into Brothels captures her determination to save the kids by first inspiring them creatively, and then figuring out how to get them educations.

"It was an incredible experience," says Briski. "This whole project has really been all about empowering children through photography, and that's why I started a foundation called Kids With Cameras. I didn't know what I was doing when I started this. I was just responding to the kids around me, and they were very curious about my camera. It's really turned into something else, which is amazing."

Making a film, much less winning an Academy Award for it, was not on the photographer's mind when she made her first trip east. "I went to India in '95 to photograph different women's issues and whatever I found," she says. Briski documented problems of infanticide and selective abortion, "And then in '97 I went to Calcutta because I had photographs in a show. The next day someone took me to the red-light district. Prostitution wasn't anything I had planned to photograph. Even that part of it was a real surprise."

Then Briski discovered the children, who were fascinated by her camera. Avijit, Gour, Kochi, Manik, Puja, Shanti, Suchitra and Tapasi (there was a ninth child who was not present during much of the filming) became her focus, her proteges, and then her crusade. "I was really just responding to people asking me for help." She says. "It was quite simple: 'Take my child, take them somewhere safe.' It was the women and the chilldren. I just went around asking people. That's when I found out that nobody really wants to empower these kids. Or these women."

"Zana Auntie," as she was known to the children, was strongly affected by their impending fate. Ranging from ages 8 to 12 when she met them, their options were few. The three boys, with their adult personalities already emerging, were heading for a life that gave them the option of becoming pimps, thieves, drug dealers and users, and sellers of illegal alcohol.

The girls, however, wrestled with the knowledge that they soon would be "on the line" – start prostituting themselves. Some reveal that they are already feeling pressure from the prostitutes, or even their relatives. They live in the same rooms in which their mothers conduct business. Life is cheap, money talks, filth is everywhere, and profanity prevails.

Briski started teaching the kids photography at the tail end of one of her trips. She bought cameras in the States, and returned to Calcutta in 2000 with renewed determination.

She also brought a video camera and began to film. Had she not contacted Kauffman, though, Briski would have been unable to play her crucial role in front of the camera. "He was my boyfriend at the time," she says. "He loved film. He also loves kids. He was editing, and he really didn't want to edit even though he's great at it. It was a very intimate situation he came into, as I had spent year building trust with these kids."