Hacker Cinema
Born into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
2004 · Film · documentary · 85 min
Directed by Zana Briski, Ross Kauffman
Documentary depicting the lives of child prostitutes in the red light district of Songachi, Calcutta. Director Zana Briski went to photograph the prostitutes when she met and became friends with their children. Briski began giving photography lessons to the children and became aware that their photography might be a way for them to lead better lives.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
3 comments on Hacker News
I highly recommend the movie, Born into Brothels [0]. It's set in Sonagachi, in some sense the analogue of Kamathipura in Calcutta.
Crumbling concrete congestion aside Sonagachi is quite different. Here sex workers are self organized, have a political voice and are unionised. The latest form of which is
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durbar_Mahila_Samanwaya_Committee
[0] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0388789/
I think one of the problems here is a reality and perception don't align:
- Apple has over a billion devices out there.
- Child abuse is a rare problem, but with over a billion devices, there will be enough of it for a lot of newsworthy stories.
- Child pornography takes just one abused child for an arbitrary number of viewers. Arguably, by the time you're limiting the number of viewers, most of the harm has been done.
On the whole, I'm not quite sure how the Apple plan will protect actual children from rape (except to somewhat reduce the secondary harm of distribution). I can clearly see how it will protect Apple from bad press, though -- people won't use iPhones to record that.
On the other hand, an investment in education, health care, reporting, and enforcement could significantly reduce the amount of child abuse, but with 7 billion people in the world, no expense would bring it to zero. So long as it's not zero, the potential for bad press is there. Indeed, usually if something happens a few times per year, it receives more bad press than if it happens a few times per day.
Apple has every incentive to be (1) seen as doing something (2) do things which protect its brand value. Apple has no incentive to invest in education, health care, reporting, and enforcement. Those seem like good things to do, but if anything, if a scandal comes up, those sorts of things are used to say "See, Apple new, and was trying to buy an out."
As a footnote, if we value all children equally, a lot of this is super-cheap. This is a good movie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_into_Brothels
And the problem it portrays could probably be solved with the same finances as the salaries of a few Apple engineers, and a focused, targeted effort to identify child prostitutes, help their families with the economics which force those kids to become child prostitutes, and get those kids into schools instead.
I'm guessing the $100k raised from this film will do more to protect kids than this whole Apple initiative will do.
There was a documentary on the City of God DVD that was better than the film (and I thought it was an amazing film).
A few from Netflix that I could find that I rated:
Endless Summer
Death in Gaza
The Filth and the Fury
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Baseball
March of the Penguins
The Art of the Steal
Born Into Brothels
The Aristocrats
God Grew Tired of Us
The Fog of War
The Lost Wave
The Last Waltz
Festival Express