Below is an all quote from $pread, the Spring issue. Read on.
We ran out to see this documentary because of enthusiastic emails circulating on sex workers' rights lists, so were surprised to find that the directors seemed uninterested in portraying the prostitutes in the documentary as human beings, much less in making a case for improving their rights. The documentary takes place in a Calcutta brothel, where photo-journalist Zana Briski and filmmaker Ross Kauffman focus on the children of brothel workers, and while the relationships Briski develops with these children are touching and inspiring, the documentary's representation of their parents is unsympathetic, to say the least.
Briski first took interest in photographing the lives of brothel workers in Calcutta's red light district seven years ago, though her focus soon shifted to the children of these workers, who are now the srars of her documentary. Briski began teaching photography classes to the children soon after she arrived in Calcutta, and eventually arranged a deal with Kodak, proving cameras and film for each child. Briski's students are thrilled to take on the challenges their teacher present and each child's individual style quickly evident in his or her art. The children's explorative photographs are a striking addition to the directors' own filmography.
Briski uses photography as a means of providing the children with a sense of ownership and purpose in what she presents as an otherwise hopeless environment. She additionally puts her students' photographs to work---they become a means to raise money for the children's education and to get them out of the brothels.
Briski is portrayed as a devoted outsider, committed to bettering the lives of the children she works with because, in her eyes, the locals are not up for the task. Brothel itself is painted as a sordid environment ruled by adults whose faces are rarely shown in full light, except when scolding their children or denying Briski permission to sent them off to boading schools. She makes no attempt, at least on camera, to develop relationships with the brothel workers, nor to offer them support in developing better relationships with thier own children: instead, she seems to have written them off as already 'beyond salvation'.
When the film and its directors seem well intentioned (and have no doubt provided a creative outled and much needed financial resources for the children), the women who work in the brothels are unjustly reprensetd as anonymous, enexplained shadows of people and unfit parents. The ending of the film, where we find out that most of the children who Briski managed to enroll in school were either withdrawn by thier parents or dropped out of their own accord, seems indicative of the limitations of focusing solely on 'rescuing' people from the sex industry without providing support and assistance for those who remain in or return to it.
---Rebecca Lynn and Rachel Aimee