Born into Brothels is a difficult film to watch, more difficult because, as a documentary, the fate of its primary characters – eight children, ages ten to twelve, all the offspring of prostitutes in Calcutta’s squalid red-light district – is something you know they will have to live with the whole of their lives. Zana Briski, the photographer who came to live in Sonagachi district to document the lives of the women & ended up teaching photography classes for their children, letting the kids document their own lives, often speaks of the children as “doomed” if she can’t find boarding schools who will take them on scholarship. It’s hard not to watch the kids with value-judgments in abeyance – the kids work hard, are treated brutally by their parents & neighbors (a scene that is repeated more than once), have no visible formal education & have to flee their homes to play on the streets or rooftops whenever mom brings home a customer. Families, grandparents included, sleep on mats with no fixed sense of order. One boy, having photographed a pair of sandals left in some spilled curried rice, demands, “In what other country would you find people who put their shoes in their food?”

And yet with the resiliency & optimism of almost all children their age, the young photographers picture reveal a world of richness & bright colors, great humor & limitless empathy. One girl’s photograph of her sister’s friend (above) ends up as the cover to an Amnesty International calendar. Another boy, Agavit, perhaps the ultimate protagonist of this film, is invited to Amsterdam to participate in a World Press Photography Foundation show of children’s photography from around the world.

The gap between Agavit’s potential & his present circumstance becomes all the more extreme when his mother is murdered – torched apparently by her pimp. The boy responds with understandable anger & depression, not knowing if he wants to continue with is photography or his (equally magnificent) painting. A portion of the film chronicles “Zana Auntie’s” increasingly desperate interactions with school officials, passport offices, a bureaucracy unspeakably inept & overwhelmed. This is interspersed, literally, with field trips as the takes the kids to the ocean & the zoo (where some identify strongly with the caged conditions of the animals).

The children speak of wanting to leave the district, of not turning into prostitutes or drug dealers, with the same language one hears here from felons about prison reform & rehabilitation, knowing what is expected of them by the camera – indeed by the entire outside world – yet in fact a boarding school & real education would cleave them from their families forever. It’s an almost impossible choice between the most impoverished demimonde I’ve ever seen – no one even bothers to investigate the murder of Agavit’s mother – and something not that removed from the Carlisle Indian School in 19^th century Pennsylvania (which today is routinely presented as an instance of the soft version of America’s genocide of the nations it found already inhabiting the new world the U.S. coveted). And while Briski manages to get most of the kids accepted at various schools, by the time of the film’s completion, only three remained away from the district – one of these a girl who ran away from home to accept her scholarship. The other girls will be “in the line” turning tricks well before they turn 15.

We watched this film with our boys & had a long thoughtful conversation afterwards. What they found most moving was not that these children their own age were being channeled toward prostitution as such, but the evident emotional brutality of parents & neighbors, the idea that these bright, hopeful children were going to turn out like their parents. That’s not separable from the fact of prostitution & its ancillary drug scene, at least not in Calcutta (one father attempted, during the course of the film, to sell his ten-year-old daughter). They all commingle when sex, drugs & money fuse together in the lowest rungs of the world economic system.