Children, Youth and Environments

Children, Youth and Environments 15(1), 2005 Review of the Film Born into Brothels Rachel Silvey Department of Geography,University of Colorado Boulder, USA Citation: Silvey, Rachel. (2005). “Review of the Film Born into Brothels.” Children, Youth and Environments 15(1): 362-363. Comment on This Film Review Produced and directed by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski. In English and Bengali, English subtitles. Distributed by ThinkFilm. Running time 85 minutes The Oscar-winning film Born into Brothels focuses on the lives of children whose mothers are sex workers in Calcutta, India. The cinematography is beautifully crafted, drawing the viewer into the rich colors and textures of the daily lifeworlds of the low-income community members at the center of the film. The film follows Zana Briski, a highly regarded western photojournalist, through her journey of discovery of the children who live in the red light district. She sees the brothel youths’ vulnerability to violence and abuse, their limited opportunities for education, and the high likelihood that they will be caught in cycles of sex work, but she recognizes and appreciates the children’s creativity and human agency. Zana develops a strong affinity for the children and her affective ties seem to run deep with each of them individually. As a photographer, she wants to help them tell their stories through photographs that they themselves take. The film follows the children through their photography class with Zana and explores the images that the children collect in the context of film footage detailing the struggles between parents and children, and sex workers and their clients. The brothel is clearly not a pleasant place in which to grow up. The producers are to be commended for the vivid and nuanced view they provide of these lives and this place. A viewer leaves the film with the sense that he/she has actually visited the brothel community, heard the voices of the children, and breathed the air in Calcutta. Despite these many strengths, the film’s storyline does seem to reinforce a colonial attitude toward the poor Indian children, and to present Zana as the self-sacrificing, kind-hearted woman who works to save them. The irony of this is that Zana’s Review of the Film Born into Brothels 364 goals and methods are clearly aimed at challenging negative stereotypes about these children (if not their mothers), and she has directed a great deal of energy into helping the children enter boarding schools and teaching them to use photography as a creative medium. Given that these goals are such a central feature of the film, it could have had a more critically self-reflexive stance toward the discursive colonization and reification of racial/national historical privilege that comes along with such a storyline. We never hear what the mothers think about the sex work that they do, nor do we know much about the various qualities of other low-income jobs or communities that might help us put this story into a broader context. Recent research (Kempadoo and Doezema 1998) has found that many women move in and out of sex work depending on a variety of factors, including the availability of other jobs, relative wage rates, and their stage in the life cycle. This research challenges the view (usually imposed from outside) that sex work is necessarily worse than other forms of low-income, highly exploitative labor. Moreover, while Zana is busily volunteering to save the kids from their futures as sex workers by enrolling them in boarding school, we see that at least several of the children and their mothers want to live together. It is crucial to ask how the film’s storyline obscures, and thus unwittingly contributes to, the broader global structural inequalities that silence children’s voices and disenfranchise women in India. References Kempadoo, Kamala and Jo Doezema, eds. (1998). Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition. New York and London: Routledge. Rachel Silvey is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her interests involve migration, Indonesia, feminist theory, critical development studies, and the politics of transnationalism. Her expertise is in the gender dimensions of migration and economic change in Indonesia. ...