The heartbreaking documentary Born Into Brothels brings to mind last year's ferociously entertaining arthouse hit City Of God, partially due to unmistakable thematic similarities: Both are about seemingly dead-end kids from impoverished upbringings who find redemption through photography, by paying artistic witness to the madness, despair, and joy surrounding them. But it's also due to the tension, excitement, and questions both films provoke. Is it somehow immoral and voyeuristic for viewers to glean pleasure out of subject matter as harrowing as the lives of impoverished Calcutta children growing up in squalid whorehouses? Does visceral enjoyment qualify as a ticket to empathy and understanding, or is it just a cheap holiday in other people's misery?
Born Into Brothels leaves the answers to those questions up to the audience. It's a movie that feels rather than thinks, that lives rather than pontificates. The film's slender premise follows Western photographer-turned-director Zana Briski as she tries to secure education and opportunities for the gifted, poverty-wracked Indian children to whom she teaches photography. The kids may not know the specifics of what happens when their mothers disappear into filthy, cramped rooms with strange, often inebriated men, but they grasp the essence of the situation with grim resignation and harbor few illusions about themselves, their families, or their futures. As empathetically captured by Briski and co-director Ross Kauffman, the kids are a riveting combination of hardboiled world-weariness and radiant, childish joy. Surprisingly articulate and insightful, they're jaded miniature adults one moment, gleeful scamps the next.
Briski and Kauffman cover too many children to go into much depth about any of them. They bring a photographer's sensibility to Born Into Brothels rather than a narrative filmmaker's, favoring unforgettable images over in-depth storytelling, and prioritizing electrifying moments over narrative arcs. The most brilliant images of the filmmakers and the pint-sized shutterbugs alike play like a spiritual X-ray that captures their subjects' souls in a way that transcends language and reason. The film and the children both pluck shining moments out of time, fragments that convey worlds of meaning and emotion, and preserve them for eternity.