An incredible movie, that I watched last weekend...I cried buckets but they were good tears.
What: a woman works as a photographer in the red light district of Calcutta, documenting the lives of women who live in the brothels. She finds herself surrounded by their children. She decides to teach a photography class and equips the children with cameras. They edit and select their best pictures and learn from her. The photographer several shows of the children's work together in order to raise money to pay for boarding school. It's the only chance they may get, some of them are on the verge of being forced into prostitution or have already been exploited. She puts on several sucessful shows at Southebys. The children profiled in the documentary are amazing and the female photographer who works with them as well. Each child has such a strong personality, and they are a tightnit ragtag group. They taunt one another with love, and are realistic about their futures. Each child speaks directly to the camera about things, and we also get to watch them interact with each other as they head on several photographic excursions, and work with the photographer. The boy above is singled out as having great talent, and an epic battle mounts to get him papers so he can represent India at a show in Amsterdam.
If you would like to cry a little more, read The Year the Gypsies Came, a YA novel by first time novelist Linzi Glass. Set in apartheid South Africa, it chronicles the life of a twelve year old girl, the summer a traveling family comes to a stop on their land, living out of a trailer with two boys. As time passes, Emily carries more and more of the dark secrets of the adult world around her. Something ominous hovers as the story unwinds languidly like the dark python one of the visitors wears over her shoulders...
"If it were not for our proximity to the lake and the woods where they camped, we might never have encountered them. It was from beyond the lake that they came into our lives. From where, I do not know; no one ever asked. It did not seem to matter at the time. They simply walked into our world from across the road. Weary travelers carrying the fates of our lives in their dank pockets."
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