There's some question as to how much a documentarian should involve his or herself with their subject; as to whether or not he or she should remain entirely objective in their perspective. Personally, I see it as a gray area, and as far as I'm concerned Michael Moore is no less a documentarian than Errol Morris, Nick Broomfield no less than than Alain Resnais, or Joe Berlinger, or Morgan Spurlock (it should be noted that this perception is in regards to the filmmakers themselves, and not their work).

I bring this point up to introduce my response to two major criticisms of Born Into Brothels, an effective and important new documentary from photographer Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman. The film documents the years Briski spent in the red light district of Calcutta, time originally intended to be spent photographically documenting the lives of prostitutes, until Briski's focus gravitated towards the lives of those women's children. She found in them the same cheerfulness and bright resilience that all young children have before the realities of their world become apparent to them (and indeed, some of the older girls are grimly aware of the future occupation they're expected to fill). Befriending a group of them, she gave them cameras and taught them the basics of photography. Whe was impressed with their creativity (a trait entirely unvalued in their world), and the speed at which it developed; further lessons lead to gallery shows and some degree of acclaim, and the more time Briski spent with these burgeoning talents, the greater was her determination to help them escape the fate of their particular caste.

The film is as moving, depressing and joyful (both alternately and, frequently, simultaneously) as you might expect. Some of the children do indeed manage to step outside of the vicious cycle and go on to better things; after cutting through a ridiculous amount of red tape, Briski manages to enroll several girls in a private school, and one child in particular, a contentious but gifted boy named Avijit, travels to Amsterdam on a photography scholarship. Others, sadly, refute Briski's assistance; most of these are under pressure from family members who, for whatever reason, don't want their children to have better lives than they do.

And perhaps they (however blindly) don't see their lives as being that bad at all; one of the criticisms waged against Briski by several critics, including Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, is that she gives the actual families short thrift in the film; that there is no insight into the lives of these prostitutes and their own perspectives on their children. We do see that they anticipate the income their children will eventually bring to the household once they join 'The Line' of sex workers that assembles on the streets every night, but by offering no further impression of these mothers and grandmothers, Briski practically vilifies them while offering herself as a surrogate.

However, had Briski afforded these women a more in-depth portrayal, I have to wonder if there would actually have been much more to discover; the fact of the matter is that they are uneducated, presumably uninformed and calloused individuals, for whom love has been superseded by economics; questions of ethics aside, Briski is almost certainly a much better influence on the children than their onw mothers. Still, could she have taken the time to show how the mothers became this way? Indirectly, I believe she does just that: she focuses on the children, who in their varied ages offer a vivid impression of how a bright young girl could end up as a tired old prostitute; how innocence turns to awareness, turns to fear, turns to acceptance, turns to complacency.

The second accusation against Briski is that, in the process of helping these kids, she opportunistically lionizes herself. To an extent, perhaps, this is true; she is on-screen in nearly every scene (on the other hand, co-director Kauffman, operating the camera, remains unseen through the duration of the picture), and as a result it is never left in doubt that the motivating factor behind these kids' potential salvation is, quite simply, Briski herself.

But here the question of objectivity comes into play: what would these critics have had Briski do instead? Perhaps if she had remained behind the camera and left her own anthropological efforts undocumented, or perhaps documented but as no more than a footnote, her film would have been more academically sound, more by-the-rules; but it would not have been so urgent. Urgency, I think, is important in films like these, which involve terrible circumstances still very much in effect. Briski came to Calcutta to document impartially, and found that she could not; that she strived for so long to help these children is a beautiful thing; that it is she herself who did the striving becomes, I think, merely incidental to the results. Those results are both heartbreaking and inspiring; more importantly, they're edifying, and that's something any good documentarian, no matter what their approach, should aspire to provide.