Digest Number 1389

[Guest guest]

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0449/anderson.php

For those interested.Avram

 

 

ana Briski may never make another movie. After all, "I never intended to make

this one," she says of Born Into Brothels, the Sundance-honored,

Oscar-short-listed documentary she co-directed with Ross Kauffman (opening

December 8 at

Film Forum).

Seven years in the making, it concerns the children of prostitutes in the

red-light district of Calcutta—how they live, how they keep smiling. It's also

about their photography (taught to them by Briski, who actually lived in a

brothel). And it's about the money the children's photographs have raised for

their

education, the school for red-light kids that will now be built (on land

donated by the "Divine Mother" Ammachi, India's "hugging saint"), and the

hope—so

crushed after the nonfiction orgy of the recent election—that a documentary

can make a difference.

Briski and Kauffman seem an odd couple—and actually were one when shooting

began. Kauffman, a no-nonsense New Yorker, was a doc editor trying to transition

into camera work; Briski, a Cambridge-educated, New York–based photographer

who went to Calcutta at the invitation of some Tibetan monks, was on a

spiritual quest. She'd been in Calcutta three years when she asked Kauffman to

help

make a film. "I was too ignorant for trepidation," Kauffman says.

"India was the last place I wanted to go," says Briski, a World Press Photo

winner. "The crowds, the chaos, the denigration of the female—even though they

worship goddesses—was antithetical to me. But it was something I had to

explore."

HBO picked up the film at first glance; it will air next fall. Meanwhile, the

directors may have to contend with the knee-jerk assumption that they were

white do-gooders delivering patriarchy unto a third-world hellhole. But,

Kauffman says, "Zana didn't go in there trying to save kids. She actually went

in

there by accident and was just sort of reacting to what she could do. We've been

in credit card debt over $100,000 combined for the last five years. It's not

like we're rich Americans trying to save the world." Briski adds, "It's a

choice of whether to live in the world or retreat from it. If I live in it I

have

to respond to it. It's not about saving, or guilt, or trying to do good."