red light

Occasionally the GE tries to get me to write details about our s*x life in my blog. After something particularly interesting happens, he'll look at me and ask if that's going in the blog. Never fear, dear readers, I will not share those naughty bits with you. That said, let me tell you about the movie we watched.

Born into Brothels is a documentary about a photographer, Zana something, who lives and works in the red light district of Calcutta. She has met and befriended several children and begun teaching them photography. The film follows them as they become adept at creating and editing photographs. Because of where they live, their personal lives are meanwhile going downhill, most of the girls facing a life of prostitution and the boys facing drug addiction and not much else. The film is beautiful, partly because its subject matter is so colorful. The children are as pretty and beguiling as their surroundings are sordid and filthy.

The GE said that it's hard to believe that places like Calcutta's red light district still exist. In a way I agree with him, but I think that places like that will always exist, at least while there are inequities in society. One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the photographer's decision to get a group of the children into school. She spends hours and hours gathering their paperwork, begging schools to take them, convincing their parents to let them go, but she says at one point that she has done all she will and all she wants to do, which is way more than most people would do.