The winner of 2004’s Academy Award® for Best Documentary Feature, Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman’s Born into Brothels isn’t nearly as prurient an experience as you might expect from a movie focusing on the plight of young children growing up in the notorious red light district of India’s Sonagachi, a highly impoverished section of Calcutta.

That’s partly because of the kids themselves, on whom the filmmakers mostly concentrate, not their fallen mothers trapped by the unavoidable scourge of “The Line,” an inevitable life of prostitution with little if anything to prevent their hapless daughters, some not quite teenagers already, following in their ill-fated footsteps. Strangely enough the eight featured children–Avijit, Gour, Kochi, Manik, Puja, Shanti, Suchitra, and Tapasi–are vibrantly alive, many with hopes of escaping the slums and securing an all-important education no matter how fanciful, how impossible it might sound. (Their fathers, if they’re even still alive, are invariably drug addicts, strung out on hashish.)

The kids talk openly and unsentimentally about their lives. “The men who enter the building are not so good,” comments one. They work hard tending house–cooking, cleaning dishes, and babysitting siblings. As a result they are mature beyond their years–older and very much the wiser.

Born into Brothels is all about second chances and the opportunity here has been provided in the form of a simple Western tool that many of us take for granted: a point-and-shoot camera. Briski and Kauffman, the former of whom appears on film and works side-by-side with the children, ask the kids of Sonagachi to tell their own story in words and (mostly) pictures through the construct of a basic photography class and the results are often mesmerizing, with the children–who range in age from ten to fourteen–possessing incredible and heretofore untapped natural talent.

Briski’s original goal was to live and work among the prostitutes, capturing the sordid surroundings and conditions that front their illegal activities on film (no easy task to be sure). But she was instantly drawn to the children and quickly changed her approach. In that regard she breaks the cardinal rule of documentary filmmaking by actually getting involved in the children’s lives, attempting to register them for boarding school, for example, and influencing some of their decision making, such as securing a visa and other travel documents for the 11-year-old Avijit so that he can journey to Amsterdam to participate in a World Press Photo Foundation exhibit.

In that regard we are afforded many opportunities to witness Calcutta’s incomprehensible bureaucracy, as Zana Auntie (as the kids call Briski) battles stubborn government officials and their endless red tape.