Cam On is a film-making collective comprising some of the estimated 500 sex workers and their children who live in Boro Goli, the red light district in Kalighat, a desperately poor area on the southern edge of Kolkata. “The street holds many stories,” says Rabin, the son of a Nepalese woman who was sold by her uncle into sex work at 12. “Love and threat at every turn.” He is the director of the film the collective is making, Nupur: The Story of Two Sisters. It’s a fictionalised amalgam of many of the members’ real experiences and tells the tale of an older sister who hopes to escape the fate that seems set for her and a younger one who lacks hope that it is possible.
Redlight to Limelight is the documentary – part of the BBC’s award-winning Storyville strand – by Bipuljit Basu that follows them as they make their film, building art out of suffering, creating something worthwhile in an environment that seems hellbent on allowing nothing.
