Review of Born into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids (2004) by Edith N — 15 Mar 2007

Okay, first off, some of these kids are so cute! Suchitra is genuinely lovely, and Manik is going to be totally hot when he grows up. Puja is a doll--and she is seriously charismatic. I can totally see her having a future career in television or Bollywood.

These kids are from one of the poorest urban areas in the world. They are the children of Calcutta's red light district. Most, if not all, of their female relatives are prostitutes. Their relatives are drug dealers. Their relatives sell illegal alcohol in their horrible little apartments. The girls have no expectation that they will manage to escape their mothers' fates. The boys have no expectation that they will make anything of their lives.

And one day, an American woman brought them cameras and taught them how to take pictures. She also--and let us not underestimate this aspect of it--worked her butt off for them, trying to get them into actual schools, boarding schools away from their neighborhoods.

Avijit is amazingly talented. All of the kids are pretty good photographers, but I fully expect him to make a career at it. The others may or may not; I think they could. However, I would be surprised if he didn't.

The end of the film tells us the place these kids reached at the point the film was completed. The DVD tells us where they were three years later. We don't know where they'll be after that. What's more, there are literally thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands, of children not so lucky. My understanding is that the funds raised go toward helping them. How many Gours and Mamonis and Tapasis do not have helpful American women giving them cameras and working to get them into schools? And, worse, how many [i]cannot[/i] get into schools because the schools won't take them?