Project red light

NEW YORK —  If ever a filmmaker deserved to be in her own movie, it would be Zana Briski.

During the seven years it took to make her documentary, “Born Into Brothels,” she spent more than three of them living in a Calcutta brothel, taught the children of prostitutes the rudiments of photography, and even helped place some of these children in schools. She crossed the line between reporter and participant, albeit reluctantly. She didn’t even particularly like the place.

“Every day is like going to war, just dealing with the traffic and the pollution and the poverty and the animals, and the people wanting money from you,” Briski said of India, where during the course of her stay she contracted hepatitis A and B, malaria, bacterial dysentery, giardiasis and bronchitis. “It’s a very hard place to be.”

But her film, co-directed with Ross Kauffman and slated to open Jan. 28, is not about her. It’s about the kids -- Kochi, Shanti, Avijit, Suchita, Manik, Gour, Puja, Tapasi -- whom the camera follows around the twisting, narrow streets of Sonagachi, Calcutta’s notorious red-light district. The filmmakers document the squalid homes, tragic family histories (some of them even have grandmothers in the trade), eerily conventional domestic chores, occasional high spirits and, more than anything, the crushing sense that life won’t get any better.

It does, though, at least for some of them, and all because of Briski and this movie.

Originally the British-born, New York-based photographer, who majored in religious studies at Cambridge University, had no intention of going to India. But in 1995 she was invited by some Tibetan monks to live in their monastery. Then, indulging her interest in women’s issues, she went out on her own to document the cultural aversion to girls. She “hung out in hospitals and clinics, watching women give birth and then what happens if they have a girl” (meaning, sometimes, infanticide).

She went back to New York but returned to India two years later, and it was on that trip that she went to Calcutta and found another women’s issue just waiting to be documented in the red-light district.

Not surprisingly, access wasn’t easy.

“I went through journalists, I went through NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], I went through local women,” Briski said. “And finally I met a brothel owner that was pretty sympathetic because he wanted to be seen to be doing social work. He ran for local elections.”

While photographing the women for an essay on life in a brothel, Briski found herself being tailed by their kids, who would pick up her camera and pretend to shoot. She realized that giving them cameras would get her more involved in the community and also provide a window into it. So she gave each kid a point-and-shoot camera. Her students (21 in all, though only eight appear in the finished film) were drawn from several brothels in the area, including the one in which she stayed.

“From the very first class I taught them how to put the batteries in and how to do flash and very basic stuff,” she said. “And then I said, ‘Let’s go out and shoot.’ They ran down the stairs, disappeared immediately, and I was like, now what do I do? There was a moment when I thought, ‘It’s all over.’

“But it worked. They came back an hour later with their film shot, totally excited.”

She gave each of the kids one roll of film a week and a homework assignment, which they seldom remembered to do, though they did shoot the rolls. Some of what they returned with -- photos of one another, animals, street people -- showed great promise. Finally she decided to put what they were doing on film -- perhaps a 10-minute short -- and tried to interest her then boyfriend, Kauffman, a documentary film editor.

Bit by bit, a film comes together

He passed on the idea but bought her a video camera. When she sent him the footage, he changed his mind: “I saw the first tape, and I was pretty blown away. I was on a plane for Calcutta three weeks later.”

By this time Briski was living in a hotel because she needed a safe place to keep her equipment and negatives. On a typical day she and Kauffman would go to the red-light district, hang out with the kids (sometimes filming them, sometimes not) and shoot Briski’s night classes. She also organized outings to the zoo, a water park, the beach. The two then returned to New York, where in 2001 Briski organized an auction of the kids’ photographs at Sotheby’s.

It was then that the film -- and Briski’s part in it -- began to take shape.

“While she was organizing it, she would tell everybody the story of the kids,” Kauffman said. “I’m hearing this stuff and I’m hearing this narration in the film while she’s saying it. So I said I have to start recording her conversations. It drove her absolutely nutty because she didn’t want to be on camera. That’s not what we were doing, but I knew that we needed to tell the story somehow.”

So on their second trip together Kauffman filmed more of her with the kids and also recorded her interviews with translators. That approach allowed for the retelling of how Briski became involved with the youngsters and their plight in a natural way rather than relying upon the more traditional scripted voice-over. (In fact, most of the voice-over is culled from these conversations.) He also filmed her efforts to get the kids into schools, which included battling not only Indian bureaucrats -- none of the kids had birth certificates; all had to be tested for HIV -- but also their resistant mothers and relatives.

Documenting all of these efforts of course invites the accusation that Briski is some kind of paternalistic, self-aggrandizing great white Westerner. But as Sundance Film Festival documentary film program director Diane Weyermann said: “If you look at her motivation, it’s pure compassion. It’s not because it makes a better story or a better film. She is not a do-gooder. She’s a professional photographer living in a brothel and in the process of being there was compelled out of humanity to address the kids. That’s a far cry from Westerners who come and leave.”

It turned out, however, that Briski eventually had to leave.

“I was getting threatened,” she said. “I got followed. My translator got followed. The more I was pushing to get documents, the more I would hear that people were watching me. It was time to stop. And not only was I putting myself in danger, I thought I was putting my kids in danger. Definitely the NGOs were not happy. I was on their turf, which is pathetic, but that’s the way it is.”

So they returned to New York with 170 hours of footage. Briski, the “credit card queen” (as Kauffman calls her for her ability to move her debt load from one credit card to another), was $50,000 in the hole. While the film was being edited (it took about a year), she established a foundation, Kids With Cameras, not only to help her kids but also to expand the fundraising idea to other countries’ children -- Haitian servant girls, Cairo kids who live in garbage dumps, Israeli and Palestinian kids (the purpose in Israel is not to alleviate poverty but to bring these estranged groups together).

When “Born Into Brothels” was finally finished last year, it went on the festival circuit, winning 24 awards; it also has been short-listed for a best documentary Oscar nomination. Sales of the children’s photos have raised $100,000. On the heels of all this, Briski and Kauffman, who remain close friends, plan to open a school for children of prostitutes on donated land in Calcutta.

Now, after so many years on this project, Briski said, “I’m so tired. I’m tired of this because it’s people’s lives. I really would like to have my own life back and start doing my own photography again. But on the other hand we’ve reached so many people. So many people’s hearts are opening, and they want to get involved.”