SoTrumpBelieve Must See Movie...

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

adonis98-743-186503 Documentary photographer Zana Briski journeyed into Calcutta's underworld to photograph the city's prostitutes. In return, she offered to teach the prostitutes' children the basics of photography so that the kids could document their own lives on the streets of one of the world's poorest cities. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids will entertain fans of documentaries and men and women of patience but unfortunately for those who might expect something more? It's an easy skip but also a film that will bore it's viewers to death. (0/10)

ironhorse_iv While, this documentary directed by Zana Briski & Ross Kauffman indeed shine some light into the lives of Indian children living in Calcutta's Red-light district; that light was just wasn't bright enough for me to find this movie, very inspirational. It wasn't very heart-warming or informative. Generally, that would mean that the movie is bad; but for me, it's wasn't. I was just disappointed by the outcome. After all, you want to see these kids overcome their real-life hardships and struggles. It's not as encourageable to see most of the people fail at that. There is debate about the extent to which the documentary has improved the lives of the children featured in it. Yes, I get that life doesn't hand you success on a silver platter, but has the money earned through the sale of photos and a book on them really help the children. Based on my research, not so much at first as the money was used to pay off the expenses of the film and most of the children, indeed return back to the brothels. However, overtime, most of them, indeed went into school when the money came in, while a few of them, continue to be sex workers, even as of this writing. Still, it's pretty disturbing to see how poverty India still is, even in the 21th century. The environment in which, these children of sex workers live and work, is horrendous even if most of them, had strict community rules not to force anybody to be prostitution, clinics and a trade union. You still can't help, feeling bad for the children. Its sucks to think that these children live in an area, sex slavery, trafficking and underage child prostitution is still able to exist. I get that in India, prostitution is legal and the prostitutes mostly run the area, themselves, and nothing wrong with that, but gees, India's Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) need to set up some better guidelines on the safety of the workers and their families. Yet, Zana Briski's organization, 'Kids with Cameras' continues to work toward improving the lives of children from the Calcutta red light district with the recent building of the Hope House. However, I hate the whole 'White Man's Burden' self-promotion approach to the film. I don't believe that all of the children's parents were abusive and ignoring their children wishes for education programs and career building activities. If anything, India's parents need to solve this problem, not a million Western Non-governmental organizations. It sad to see that outside foreign help was needed to solve this domestic problem in India, when India could do it, on its own. I wish, the country could had done better. I wish the movie also show more on the dangers of the kid's surroundings. It's weird to see, the film talks about how crude, the 'johns' are; but most of the abuse, comes from the madams or mothers that run the place. Not to question, other people's parenting, but there were scenes, where I was really wondering why, Briski didn't put the camera down and do something to stop this abuse. One thing, the movie really fails to mention, is how India's largest red-light district was even created and why, those families are even there. Nor does it tell in depth how a British photographer and filmmaker Zana Briski got so close with the families, to the point that she was able to set up a photography class with their children, without angering the criminals and the clients on how much outside exposer, their environment was getting. You would think, that somebody would threaten Briski at least, one. After all, weren't these people, very fearful, feeling of apprehension, anxiety, and having inner turmoil. How was this film possible to be made? Another thing, there is hardly any background information on the human subjects and the area, they live in, by the filmmakers. As a clueless American, I had no idea where, or when this film is taking place. All, I knew, is that it was in India, and somewhere in Calcutta. I wish, the movie gave a little more informative than that. I had to research after watching this film, to find out, that it takes place in Sonagachi. Overall: While this movie is widely acclaimed won a string of accolades including the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2004. In my opinion, the spotlight is little too dim and feels too much of a vanity project. In the end, it's needed to be brighter, so it can be worth seeing, multiply times.

alli1976 This movie makes me cry, but not for the reasons the filmmakers intended. Briski and Kauffman represent the situation of sex workers' children in this poor Indian district in the most un-ethical and violent way possible -- by laying the blame at the heroic, unionized sex-worker moms that have managed to carve out a safe space for their families, under the kind of conditions that would beat any westerner down, and most reprehensibly, by using the families to raise themselves to be saints in the audiences' mind. In doing so they undermine the very children they supposedly want to help, and dupe Westerners whose only access to information like this is through mainstream /Oscar flicks. I second the advice of a viewer who urges audiences instead watch the film Tales of the Night Fairies, a more caring and truthful representation. Don't depend on my opinion here --- please paste into a search engine Born into Brothels, Praveen Swami, Seema Sirohi or Partha Banerjee to read incisive critique of the film by more knowledgeable folks - people who worked translating it, know the district, or report on the Indian Frontline's investigation of the filmmakers unethical behavior.The fact that the Sonagachi Red Light District where Briski et al filmed is not only the focus of MANY hardworking aid organizations (which Briski edits out, one can only assume to portray herself as the only bright shining angel) but also a case studied globally for its successes preventing HIV infection, for how women established workers cooperatives .....to collectively ensure their rights and safety (instead of being controlled by pimps), and strict community rules not to force anyone into prostitution... will astonish viewers who have seen the film. There is no way the filmmakers could not know this, or that these women began a trade union that has grown to 60,000 members far beyond this small district. In fact, the filmmakers treat these women as the cause of the children's problems, and recommend removal of the children from their families! That Briski is British, thus from India's the former colonial power, and that she recommends a removal policy without realizing that it repeats colonial violence done in other British colonies (such as the forcible kidnapping of aborigine children in Australia in 1911 by whiter skinned people who could not imagine indigenous people capable of bringing up children) makes me wonder if it might not be BRISKI, rather than the brothel kids, who has been neglected and denied a proper education.Viewers need to know that an investigation by the Indian media Frontline showed that the film's most fundamental assumptions were false, particularly Briski's assertion that the children no education, or very little before she sent them to boarding school. In fact, ALL THE KIDS WERE GOING TO SCHOOL WHEN THE DOCUMENTARY WAS BEING MADE! It is a testament to Briski's own ignorance and misuse of rich white power that none of the cases in which she "removed" kids to boarding school have resulted in success or continuation. This is because the kids know what the sadly uneducated Briski cannot see, that their families are more than props in a gringa film. That Briski dupes Western audiences into misunderstanding the real issues in India's brothels, that she bathes in the limelight and accepts Academy Awards built on this exploitation, that she presents unethical hidden camera footage taken without these poor women's consent, that she so sneakily betrays these people who had nothing, but generously shared every single intimate part of their lives with this "savior" should alert us that somewhere, in England, children are growing up like Briski --- without being given the basic historical knowledge they so desperately need.Lets make a film about Briski's home town, use hidden cameras to show her friends in the worst light, and give it Bollywood's biggest award so we can finally remove poor rich white filmmakers from their neglectful colonialist parents, and give them to caring Calcuttans who will see that they receive the uncensored education they so desperately need.In all seriousness: This "research" would never have survived an ethics review board investigation, and suggests that we demand stronger accountability and oversight of filmmakers to ensure ethical treatment of their subjects, especially in places where people may not have access to enforcing such accountability.A better use for this film, and one that I use in my undergraduate classes, is to have students FIRST read Partha Banerjee's letter to the American Film Academy about the film's lack of ethics, and then watch BitB. Students marvel that the Oscar ignored his plea and awarded this film! I'll keep a DVD of this film in my college collection of ethnocentric diatribe classics such as "Warrior Marks" and "Not without my daughter" (apologies to Gidget). Like those films it embodies Gayatri Spivack's observation that so much of what passes as Western humanitarianism is less about helping victims and more about the image of "White men saving brown women from brown men" (in this case White women "saving" brown kids from brown women).Please, lets set up a humanitarian fund to provide history classes to the poor, abused children of Britain that, like Briski, are at risk of becoming narcissistic missionary filmmakers that exploit the third world. They should not be doomed to repeat the colonial mistakes of the past, simply because they have not listened well in history class.

kafka20 Feel very disappointed and quite angry about what I saw: we get no information at all but the outsider's ethnocentrism effort to make good stuff with a carefully construction of "Otherness", "poverty" and, of course "India". How about the general context, the structural mechanisms of social exclusion and exploitation??? How about the children's voices? Where are they? I only can heard the mute voice of a children completely admonished to tell about the adult-western wishes.Nothing to say about the "story" what is been writing for them.... (without them). Where are the children's stakeholders in Calcuta? They are "left" only with this women's help and hopes? Reflexivity and postmodernism are not this. Out there we can get arguments, multiplicity of voices, pathways of power and counter-power, history, ethnostories... but, of course, it is required some conceptual tools - say anthropology -, methodological gadgets and a clear philosophy or philosophical points of reference to start with. Instead we only see philanthropy - a lot of - and a cool project, for cool people with cool intentions, liberal and western intentions... And the world does not stop turning... you feel me?