“I want to show in pictures how people live in this city. I want to put across the behavior of man,” says Gour, one of eight children featured in the award-winning documentary Born into Brothels, a look into the lives of brothel children who use photography to escape their surroundings, which screened at the Boston Film Festival on Sunday.
Gour is a 13-year-old boy who likes to take pictures of his animals and his best friend Puja. Like his fellow classmates, Gour lives in the brothels of Calcutta, and his mother, like the mothers of the other seven children, is a prostitute.
Born into Brothels brings you into Gour’s world, a world which includes Avijit, a 12-year-old boy with an adult-like talent for painting and photography. Or Suchitra, a 14-year-old girl whose aunt pressures her daily to “go on the line” and become a prostitute herself.
Directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman suck you into the downtrodden lives of these remarkable children, showing their deepest despair and their greatest hopes. Each child takes part in Briski’s photography class, which teaches brothel children the art of taking pictures, unleashing their creativities and dreams.
We enter the children’s reality through their photographs and interviews, seeing the wretchedness of the brothels and the bright hope of their trips to the zoo and to the beach. We discover that the children are wickedly funny and spirited, as they crack jokes and dance and sing to Indian pop songs.
Puja, a fireball of energy, bounces and sings at the top of her lungs during car trips, drawing out the shyer Kochi and Shanti.
Though the children joke with each other, they are never crude like the adults at home, who rage and scream both at the children and at each other, invoking the foulest names and jeers they can manage.
Above all, the children are insightful beyond their years – they expound on their circumstances with an unsettling maturity and depth, perhaps an explanation for their equally profound photography.
Brothels is an unsentimental yet emotionally jarring piece. Briski effortlessly draws you into the lives of these children, making you truly care about what happens to them.
And the children’s outcomes truly grip the audience, as most viewers become emotionally invested in Avijit, Gour, Puja, Suchitra, Kochi, Manik, Shanti and Tapasi, caring as much about their hopes and dreams as they do.
More than anything, you want them to get out of the dejected life they’ve been born into that they otherwise will not be able to escape.
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