Cab Ride: a still photo from Born Into Brothels. Photo by Gour. Courtesy Thinkfilm.
Though we are inside a heated downtown Toronto club on a bright morning, filmmaker and photographer Zana Briski is cold, hugging herself through a Michelin-man puffy coat with “Sundance Film Festival 2004” stitched across the breast. Slumped next to her thin body on the couch is her co-director and ex-boyfriend, Ross Kauffman, short and athletic with an effortless laugh to contrast Briski’s slight reticence and wariness.
“We had 15 interviews yesterday,” says Kauffman, yawning.
“You Canadians like to get up early,” says Briski, noting that her day started at 6:30 a.m.
Oscar makes people tired. Briski and Kauffman's first film, Born Into Brothels, funded by credit cards and a smattering of grants, has been graced with an Academy Award nomination for best documentary. Over the past year, the film received a nice reception – Briski’s coat is a reminder of the audience award won at Sundance in 2004, one of a slew of film festival prizes – but with Oscar’s anointing, the publicity blitz is on. The duo doesn’t mind trotting the continent to capitalize on the Academy Awards (“I wish someone would offer me a dress, though,” says Briski. “I’m going to wear this,” says Kauffman, in a sweater and jeans) because their goal is loftier than increased box office; they want the world to notice a group of children from the red light district of Calcutta, the subjects of their film.
Briski, a 38-year-old New York-based photojournalist who speaks with traces of a childhood London accent, first went to India in 1995 to take pictures of other harrowing subjects like female infanticide and dowry deaths. On a return visit in 1998, a friend took her to the red light district, an area of the city that’s only a few blocks long though Briski estimates that nearly 7,000 people live within its curving streets and alleys. When telling the extraordinary story of her time there, Briski sounds almost blasé; she is more interested in action than analysis, often answering “ Why?” with a serene “I don’t know.”
“I was just really deeply impressed by the place. I don’t know why. I knew that was what I wanted to photograph and I spent the next two years trying to get access to be able to live in the brothel,” she says.
Finally, a brothel owner gave in to her badgering and Briski got a room.
“Very small, very dingy, lots of cockroaches. I slept on a hard concrete floor.”
“Were there any rats?” asks Kauffman, 37, who takes pleasure this morning in gently goading his serious ex.
“Yeah, they didn’t come into my room. There were mice in my room but the rats were outside. For me, rats aren’t the problem, it’s the cockroaches.”
“Oh, I’m the other way around,” says Kauffman, successfully making Briski smile.
Documentary filmmaker Ross Kauffman. Courtesy Thinkfilm.
In their worn western clothes, the children of the red light district are shunned in wider Indian society; the stigma of prostitution is so great that most schools won’t even accept the children as students, and if they do begin an education, few will graduate. Briski says that the boys may end up pimps or dealers, and the girls speak of their futures in the film with an eerie fatalism that’s shocking in young mouths. Most believe that one day they will join their mothers, and sometimes their sisters and grandmothers, “on the line” as prostitutes.
But living amongst them, Briski saw that they are also just kids, still innocent and curious about the lady with the lenses. Soon, she bought 20 snap-and-shoot cameras for a group between ages 10 and 14. Enlisting anyone who could help her translate into Bengali, she gave lessons on composition – “Shoot truth,” she told them – and fundamentals like: remember to use the flash at night, something one frustrated little boy constantly forgets.
Briski began to film the students, imagining a documentary that combined the children’s still photos with footage of their world, a realization of the abstract theory that art can change lives. But she had never used a video camera before, and after taking some initial footage – “It was pretty bad,” Briski admits – she asked Kauffman, a documentary film editor, cameraman and her boyfriend at the time, to come to India and make the film with her. He said no but she sent four tapes to him in New York anyway.
“I just wasn’t in a place where I felt like I could commit to the film,” he recalls. “I knew what it takes: three or four years of your life, financial burdens. But literally, I looked at the kids and they totally defied expectation. They were so joyful, so proud with their cameras. Within three weeks, I was in Calcutta.”
The photographs taken by the children are sometimes rote, but always interesting; these photographers have access to a world little seen (Born Into Brothels, with its fuzzy footage of illegal activity, can never air in India). Unsentimental, and without the exploitative undercurrent that mires so much photography taken by those who drop by the developing world for their own edification, many of the pictures are astoundingly beautiful. Beautiful – and tragic: some of the most spectacular are taken by a precocious boy with a heart-shaped face, Avijit, whose mother is burned to death by a pimp.
In the film, Briski grows more and more determined to carve some kind of future for these kids. She comes up against the monolith of Indian bureaucracy, seeking passports and ration cards from indifferent bureaucrats loyal to Victorian systems of bookkeeping, their ledgers wrapped in string.
“The shoot was difficult,” says Kauffman. “Lot of tension. There was always a very tenuous situation between me and Zana.”
A couple for six years, they are not together anymore, but for two years, Briski and Kauffman shot 170 hours of film side by side. Briski worked 18-hour days to find school placements for the children, and she looks wan on camera, almost sickly. The photographer, unsurprisingly, did not like being in front of the lens.
“It was harder to shoot Zana than the kids, and sometimes harder than shooting the brothel owners and pimps,” says Kauffman.
“Come on! I wasn’t that bad,” says Briski.
Documentary filmmakers and photojournalists know that Born Into Brothels violates a fundamental professional principle: be a fly on the wall. Documentarians of the cinéma-vérité school learn early not to upset the order – or even better, the chaos – but only to record it.
“That’s bullshit,” says Kauffman in a stage whisper.
Documentary filmmaker Zana Briski in Calcutta. Courtesy Thinkfilm
“I don’t pay attention to rules in my own work and it’s not how I taught the kids,” says Briski. “There are rules like: Don’t point the camera right into the sun, but why not? Breaking rules is part of being free and open. There were these amazing kids with so much talent and wisdom and humour and I was part of the story. I was involved in their lives. Our stories were intertwined, our karma was intertwined and that’s the truth. Any other kind of film would have been artificial.”
The pair returned to Calcutta recently to location hunt for a school that Briski wants to build. The organization she founded, Kids With Cameras, has raised $100,000 US selling prints of the children’s work to fund their education.
While in the city, they brought all the young photographers together and Kauffman put his cell phone on speaker. When the film distributor’s voice crackled over the line: “You got the Oscar nomination!” the kids burst into dancing and applause.
“They didn’t really know [what the Academy Awards] were but a couple of the more savvy kids explained it and they got it,” says Briski.
When the filmmakers left Calcutta this time, the children cried, something they hadn’t done before. Briski and Kauffman were caught off guard.
“There was a lot of weeping. It was strange,” says Kauffman. “I think they know what a bond we have with them now. When they were younger, it wasn’t so serious, but this time it was pretty intense. They’re starting to understand what opportunities we’ve opened up for them, and they’re appreciative.”
The image of poor children clinging to their saviours has a slight colonialist tinge, and so you wonder what happens when the colonizers pull out. Both are adamant that withdrawal is not planned; they will stay involved through to adulthood.
“There’s no ending in sight. We’ll be with these kids for a long, long time. Hopefully they’ll take care of us when we’re old,” says Kauffman.
“Or maybe not when we’re old,” says Briski, who looks like she could use some taking care of right now. She hasn’t shot her own work in more than two years, and when I ask what she’s given up of herself for this project, she says wearily: “Is there any of me left?” She reconsiders and refutes the idea that she has sacrificed much. “When I get an e-mail from a kid, it’s very sweet. One of the purest moments for me is when I get a text message from this girl Puja who’s about 13 and in school now. She’s a fiery one. It’s very real. It’s very grounding. The rest is just a whirlwind.”
Asked what they will do after the Oscars, the pair answers
simultaneously:
Kauffman: “Vacation.”
Briski: “Continue doing this.”
They look at each other and laugh.
Born Into Brothels opens in Toronto and Vancouver Feb. 18. Upcoming Canadian cities TBA.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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