Recent Viewings

Born into Brothels
A glimpse into the dismal world of children born to prostitutes in the red-light districts of urban India. Their plight is truly horrific, with the boys having little or no apparent future other than to become drug addicts like their fathers, and the girls facing the near certainty of being forced into prostitution by the time they're twelve years old. It's especially wrenching when the producer shows, over and over again, that in many ways these are bright, outgoing, and emotionally sensitive kids. Except for their language, they're much like the kids you would meet if you picked a random sample out of any suburban elementary school.

The producer's heroic attempts to get some of the children that she works with into educational programs that will give them a chance to get out of this horrific environment produces mixed results. Sometimes this is due to bureaucratic obstructionism; sometimes it's due to snobbishness on the part of the schools; sometimes it's due to obstruction from the parents themselves, who apparently see any improvement in their children's lives as an insult to themselves. Or maybe they just crave the money that they expect to get from pimping their eleven-year-old daughters, so that they can go buy more drugs for themselves.

I found that, above and beyond the children's depraved and deprived social environment, I was disgusted by the incredible overcrowding and filth of their physical environment. I have a feeling that I would, quite literally, go insane if I were constantly crowded in, elbow-to-elbow, with such teeming hordes of sullen, hostile, people, and forced to wade through ankle-deep puddles of unidentified slop in order to go down the length of a street.