Kochi, 10 "Up the Stairs"

Born into Brothels (2004)

Subject: Zana Briski moves in with sex workers in Calcutta's red light district (to document them, perhaps) and is immediately drawn to the kids. She starts a photography class with them, all the while becoming more and more attached.

I've been trying to figure out what to write about this movie for weeks now, but it never seems to come out right. Unlike so many of the subjective documentaries I normally see, this one didn't have anything to prove. Nothing to prove and a hundred silent, eloquent points.

As you watch the kids start to see their world in a different way through photography, you also so the hope that comes alive in their education and the inevitability the girls feel about their future. Suddenly, one of them isn't in the film. No one mentions where she went or what happened, yet we all know that she joined the line. Scores of women packed together in a sea of flesh, waiting for the next customer.

As Briski's relationship with the children grows, so does her desire to save them from their fate. Briski struggles to find them places in school, knowing full well that very few schools will take the children of sex workers. Briski and partner Ross Kauffman manage to fill the film with a quiet urgency, a knowledge that perhaps the sex trade is inevitable for many of these young girls.

Oh, check it out! I didn't want you to think I was just going to steal their work.

Utterly depressing; utterly uplifting. A+