Born into Brothels

Born into Brothels

A movie that speaks of 9 different children living at the Sonagchi village of Calcutta – a very familiar and famous red light area of India. It is a movie which speaks through still pictures and not video recording.

It is a movie beyond creative imagination. On the lines of photography, it shows us a completely different angle on the brothels of India, which has never been seen from the eyes of 9-12 year olds and from the aspect of photography.

The movie clearly teaches us that we don’t need to be professional photographers to click good pictures, nor do we need to have professional cameras, all we need is the vision to click pictures, and the sincerity and passion to see extra-ordinary in every ordinary thing for which all we need is an extra-ordinary vision.

There is a list of rules listed for photography but in order to be a good photographer, we sometimes, need to break these rules, and all we need is an eye that gathers unusual things around us.

A lot of film-makers have tried to portray this same issue, but nobody has ever come up with the issue of children born into brothels, and the life of brothels through innocent eyes, who don’t exactly know what’s going on around them, and they try to gather the unusual things around them.

Director ‘Zana Briski’ got hold of these children and interacts with them observes the passion in them for their own streets. She starts teaching them photography, because the excitement on their faces on seeing the camera does not go unnoticed.

The movie shows two different angles- one from the view point of the children, through still photography and how they see and perceive different things and the same thing perceived through the eyes of an adult- the director in a video format. The contrast of still photographs and video recording sets an irony between the both of them and has been put across very well.

The eyes and the vision of the children are clean so it brings put the best in them in the form of their photographs, all of them are provided with point and shoot cameras, and whatever intriguing comes their way is clicked, they see everything form a new angle and find it interesting, they have an out of the box imagination of whatever they see.

The children were taken to the streets, the beach and the zoo for exposure, where they got amazed by what they saw and thus ended up capturing those moments, best expressions of them came out. It teaches us that there are no boundaries and there is always something more than what meets the eyes.

The seven children- Avijit, Gaur, Puja, Shanti, Kochi, Suchitra and Manik share a loving relationship with each other. These children have a certain advantage of their age and innocence where they can go up to anybody and click pictures on their face.

Out of these 7, Suchitra was forced constantly by her aunt to join the line and Zena worked hard to get all the others into decent education schools. She uses their art to gather funds for their own future and education by putting up exhibition of their photographs.

The movie teaches us that to be a good photographer, we need not have the best equipment and the best of locations, the only thing which is important is to have our own perspective, the most ordinary of the things seem different to different people according to their differing perceptions and mind state.

The movie gives us an interesting sight of the role of innocence in the pictures displayed and there was no fear of judgment. They just randomly kept clicking whatever they liked and made them happy.

I respect the fact that in such a surrounding also, the children were untouched and ignorant of whatever was going on around them and nothing could even touch their innocence. The movie has merged two perspectives and given two eyes to the film.

The most important lesson which the movie gives to its viewers is that, the children who did not have the best sources available and were confined to their surroundings were able to extract so much out of it, it forces us to think and take some inspiration back home with us. And know that we are lucky and fortunate to have access to everything we want. We should never take our surroundings for granted and never see anything as ordinary, because something which is ordinary and usual for us just might not be the same for somebody else. They might find it appealing, amusing or interesting. Everybody has a different vision and a different perspective of looking at things.

The children of the Brothel in the movie later understood what photography gave them. An NGO called “The Kids with Cameras” was also started by the director of the movie- Zena to improve the condition of the Children of the Brothels and make their lives worth living from their own innocent eyes and from the lens of their cameras.