Born Into Brothels...or why I feel guilty about being white

I am a nerd. I like documentaries. I will watch documentaries about spelling bees, people who play Scrabble, fast food, former cannibals, Wisconsin filmmakers...pretty much anything. Except for penguins. I really have no desire to watch a documentary about penguins.

Last night I saw Born Into Brothels, which won the Oscar for best documentary last year, and which I've been meaning to see for a while. The basic premise is this: a New York photographer lives among the brothels in Calcutta to photograph the women who work there. She is affected by all the children she meets in the brothels and teaches them photography. Not the lightest subject matter. So I was surprised when I picked up the movie and the jacket features a picture of eight children grinning from ear to ear, and the boldfaced quote "Uplifting!" Maybe this won't be so bad. Maybe the children will be able to overcome their situations and class structure and their upbringings and all become famous New York photographers themselves! Not so much...

This film was anything but uplifting. These children live in squalor, their mothers work as prostitutes and their fathers are either abusive, addicted to drugs, or not in the picture at all, and they can't even get into school because their parents are criminals. The film itself is beautiful, as are the photographs taken by the kids. But their stories are heartbreaking, and I'm not sure how much really gets resolved. At the end of the film, there are updates as to what the kids are doing, and only two of them were even in school. So much for uplifting. There is a more recent update (three years after the film was taken) which is more uplifting (most of the children end up in some sort of school, no one is a prostitute, and the kid with the most talent has been accepted to a prestigious high school in the US), but this was still anything but a feel good movie.

There's been a lot of interesting controversy surrounding the film. Several people claim that the kids were actually worse off for haivng participated in the project (I'm not sure what the arguments for this are), and others resent the "great white hero" coming in to save the poor children with her Western values. My view is that whether or not the filmmaker had any right to meddle with the children's lives, she did try to help the children (getting them into school, introducing them to photography), and I don't think she did it (at least not as her primary purpose) for fame. And according to their own comments, these children did want to get out and have better lives.

This was an interesting and beautiful film, but don't let the "Uplifting!" fool you. It's sad. And even if the outcome for these eight children might have been upfliting, there are countless others for which it won't be.