Sunday, May 9, 4:00 PM, Charles Theatre 2

Director: Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski

Cast: Avijit, Gour, Kochi, Manik, Puja, Shanti, Suchitra, Tapasi

Country: U.S.
Year: 2003
Running Time: 85 minutes
Format: Beta SP

In 1997, photographer Zana Briski, walked out of the Baltimore Sun, and a budding career in photojournalism, and traveled to Calcutta. There she visited the infamous red light district, Sonagachi, and met lots of the children who lived there. She was fascinated, and lived in the brothels intermittently for three years. She raised some money and bought cameras, to teach the children of the Calcutta brothels the joy of photography.

Partnering with filmmaker Ross Kauffman, Briski has made a film about the world of Sonagachi, seen through the eyes of its children, that is startling. Without blinking, the filmmakers show us the choking poverty and casual violence-both physical and verbal- of the brothels. The children, as children do, accept their lives with cheerful curiosity and help us see their world through their eyes.

They respond enthusiastically to Briski's cameras and her disciplined lessons. The photographic results, some of which are for sale in the MFF ticket tent, are breathtaking. The visual insight and beauty expressed by the children of Calcutta's brothels says something very profound about our ability to communicate, and about the human instinct to create art. The result is a remarkable film without a moment of sentimentality.

-- Jed Dietz

Ross Kauffman worked as a documentary film editor from 1992-2000, editing films for HBO, PBS, National Geographic, and The Discovery Channel amongst others. In 2000 he began working as director of photography on Family Stories, a film about an extended African-American family separated by geographic, social, and economic lines. Recently, he has begun producing and directing independent documentaries.

Zana Briski grew up in Montreal and London. She studied theology at the University of Cambridge, and then attended the year-long course at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1990-91. Her first trip to India was in 1995, and that work earned a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a National Press Photographers Association "Picture of the Year" Award. She has won numerous photographic awards and grants, including: a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, the Howard Chapnick Grant, George Soros' Open Society Institute Fellowship, and a Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship.