Soon after watching Jakarta Undercover in the cinema, I saw Born into Brothels in DVD. Both are set in a centre of sex industry. Both show the plight of being a child of a sex worker. The first title was set in the wealthier district of Jakarta, the second in the poorer area of North Kolkata.
Wikipedia describes Born into Brothels as “a 2004 American documentary film about the children of prostitutes in Sonagachi, Calcutta’s red light district. The widely acclaimed film, written and directed by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, won a string of accolades including the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 2005.”
Admittedly, the film’s glowing success has drawn some controversy over its making and claims about improving the lives of the children featured in the film. For someone with limited knowledge of the red district in Kolkata and about film making, I dare say Born into Brothels is a lot better than most movies – documentary or semi-documentary – that I have seen. Well, it is not as sentimentally powerful (and also not as depressing) as a few other great films from Asia on children’s hardship, such as Dare Mo Shiranai (Nobody Knows 誰も知らない) directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, released in the same year and won many awards, or Garin Nugraha’s Daun di Atas Bantal (1998) from Indonesia, and Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (1997) from Iran.
Except the last mentioned, all these films are based on true story. They help us see fragments of the hardships that many children around the world have to endure. They are also a story about their resilience, and views of their own world. This is something that I have yet to see from the more mainstream film industry. What is so special about Born into Brothels and Daun di Atas Bantal is we see the children themselves, instead of young actors/actresses playing their roles. Furthermore Born into Brothels includes many visual and artistic works that these children produced during the making the film itself.
3 Comments
Ariel, about ‘Daun di Atas Bantal’ I think you have a good point: what is special is that we see the street kids themselves, for better or worse. Another Indonesian film in which I’ve seen a similar “ethos” (of the “actors”, both adults and children seemingly untrained in the art of acting, playing themselves)was ‘Serambi’(2005), a semi-fictional, semi-documentary “film drama dokumenter”. I guess its not a coincidence that the key figures behind the production of both ‘Daun’ and ‘Serambi’ were the same people, ie: Garin Nugroho and Christine Hakim. ‘Serambi’ was heart-breaking, and the orphaned children, as well as the widowed husband and father, and the arts activist Azhari, really brought home a sense of tragedy and despair that I haven’t felt in another movie for quite a while.
But I have a question for you: despite their apparent autonomy, are not these children merely pawns of the adult film-makers who ultimately are the ones placing them in front of the camera? To be fair, I’m sure the film-makers are well-meaning, and Christine Hakim herself is on record stating that she was haunted with the self-doubts that arose from attempting to bring to the world the stories of otherwise marginalised existences.
The reason I’ve been thinking about this recently is because I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” (2006), a haunting post-apocalyptic tale about the intimate relationship between a father and son as they struggle to survive. The novel is distinguished by its spartan dialogue (primarily between father and son). The young boy’s language in particular rang true: everything he says is so convincingly “9-8 year old boy”, and the novel is all the more resounding - and horrific - for this reason. Yet, as we know, the author is not a 9 year old boy at all! Nevertheless, I still think the novel has a great deal to offer in this respect. So, no need to look to “the mainstream film industry”, literature also has its own share of answers.
Salam saya,
Marshall
PS: Just in case my (hypothetical?) question might appear to be too harsh, I’ve seen one or two books on the tsunami disaster that have included children’s drawings of the disaster and its aftermath. Just because the book has adults as editors etc should in no way diminish the power of the children’s submissions. My own children (and their classmates)have created breath-taking drawings of the September 11 attacks and the tsunami disaster, and even if I’ve put them up to it, their drawings tell us much more than thousands of words by the world’s best adult essayists!
Hi Marshall:
Many thanks for your time to offer the thoughtful comments. I really enjoyed them. They are not harsh at all. You raised issues that have haunted anthropologists for many decades about writing the others. I have no easy answer to the issue. When I began to be intensely engaged with the question – as a student of anthropology – postmodernist self-reflexivity and modesty were appealing indeed. It was deeply a moral dilemma, rather than a fad or stylistic gimmick as others might have suspected
This is definitely a concern among many analysts and writers beyond a single discipline. For some time we have discussed “can the subaltern speak?”; your concern lead to the question: “should the subalternists speak?”