The older director will have to remake a short film in five different ways, involving five obstructions which von Trier will devise. One of the five involves making a film in "the most miserable place on Earth," which they decide is the red light district of Mumbai. The director is unable to deal with this assignment.
Now here is a documentary made in a place which is by definition as miserable: The red light district of Calcutta. They are shooting in an area where no one wants to be photographed, where lives are hidden behind doors or curtains, where with their Western features and cameras they are as obvious as the police, and indeed suspected of working for them.
Zana Briski , an American photographer, and Ross Kauffman , her collaborator, went to Calcutta to film prostitution and found that it melted out of sight as they appeared. It was all around them, it put them in danger, but it was invisible to their camera. What they did see were the children, because the kids of the district followed the visitors, fascinated. Briski hit upon the idea of giving cameras to these children of prostitutes, and asking them to take photos of the world in which they lived.
It is a productive idea, and has a precedent of sorts in a project by National Public Radio in Chicago; two teenagers, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman, were given tape recorders and asked to make an audio documentary of the Ida B.
Wells public housing project, where they lived and where a young child had been thrown from a high window in a fight over candy. Their work won a Peabody Award. The kids in "Born Into Brothels" which is one of this year's Oscar nominees take photos with zest and imagination, squint at the contact sheets to choose their favorite shots, and mark them with crayons.
