Do-gooder documentary, co-directed, co-written, and co-photographed by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, focuses on eight children in the Calcutta red-light district. Their lives and prospects are as awful as you would imagine, and the film's image is as awful as you have come to expect in the DV era. (The concealed-camera footage of the prostitutes on patrol looks roughly on a par with the video of a vice-squad sting.) The focus widens to include, as the heroine of her own film, the very photogenic Briski, or in the pet name bestowed on her by the children, "Zana Auntie," who devoted her time, when not working on her own photography of the district, to teaching her craft to the children, promoting their photos worldwide through Kids With Cameras (as well as interspersing them throughout the film), trying to place the children in boarding schools, and trying to obtain a passport for one of them to visit a conference in Holland. (The boy's mother, midway through the process, gets burned alive by her pimp.) The kids, naturally, are likable; the on-camera filmmaker is likable; the film itself is another matter, raw, ragged, and a bit of a chore to sit through. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd