Anointed by an Oscar and feted on the celebrity circuit, Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman are flying well above the mean streets of Sonagachi, Calcutta's red-light district, where their award-winning documentary Born Into Brothels is set. Briski, in a backless gown, blew a kiss from the Oscar stage across the oceans to the "kids" she said were watching in Calcutta. The big smile heralded the big times for the photographer and her co-director, now armed with the coveted statuette for their entire filmmaking life, thanks to the children and women of the city of joy.

Born Into Brothels is being hailed in the West as the ultimate uplifting film, a "humanitarian" effort by Briski who dared to live amid the squalor.

Not all wanted to pose for Puja's pictures in Briski's documentary, hence issues of consent.

Western critics and audiences are taken up by the British-born photographer's knight-in-shining-armour efforts. Some of the children too are happy she got the award. The film is about the "missionary zeal" with which she tried to save seven kids from their environment in Sonagachi. And from Calcutta, a city ever fascinating to "white" saviours, from Mother Teresa to Dominique Lapierre and now Briski.

The film centres around Briski's efforts to improve the lives of some children she befriended in 1997 while trying to document the lives of sex workers in Calcutta. Unable to fulfil her original goal, she shifted her focus to the kids, giving them cameras and basic lessons in photography. The children take telling shots of their surroundings which Briski later used for exhibitions and a Sotheby's auction in 2001 to raise money. Amnesty International used a photo for its 2003 calendar. Flush with grants, she created 'Kids With Cameras', a charitable organisation to help the children.

But Born Into Brothels won't be shown in India. At a recent screening in Washington, Kauffman said the sex workers whose children feature in the film don't want it to be shown in India. The filmmakers want to protect their identities. Really? After an Oscar and a relentless run of the festival circuit, the issue of maintaining anonymity seems far-fetched.

The decision, whatever its merit, has already led to serious questioning of the filmmakers' intent. Is it because Indian audiences and reviewers might take issue with Briski's "intervention" in the lives of some of the most unfortunate? Members of the Durbar Women's Coordination Committee, an organisation of Sonagachi's sex workers, are unhappy about Briski's high-handed decision. Sandhya Dutta, who helped Briski and lives in Sonagachi, told a Calcutta newspaper she felt "used" twice over because people in other countries were watching a film about their lives while she couldn't.

Some critics are also asking whether the duo obtained legal permission from the sex workers whose innermost lives and conflicts they exposed, sometimes through the kids. One such child, Puja, enrolled in Briski's photography class, clicks people who clearly don't want to be photographed. The photos appear in the film, raising troubling questions about consent. If Sonagachi residents do not want to be immortalised on film by one of their own, they surely wouldn't want to be exposed to a worldwide bazaar of gawkers.

The children in the film come across as children anywhere—likeable and friendly. They seem to have implicit faith in 'Zana Aunty' who shepherds them around, even taking one specially talented boy to Amsterdam for a photo contest after struggling to get him a passport. The film crosses the line from documentation to activism but no one knows whether the interventions helped or hampered the subjects.

In the end, the film seems more about Briski's journey and less about the hard reality of prostitution and the effects of her interference in young lives. It tugs at the heart but leaves the head relatively untouched. Intentionally or not, Briski is the noble soul in the film, faced with the mountain of Indian bureaucracy, teaching the children photography, trying to move them to good schools, getting them tested for aids and taking them to the zoo. The film's self-congratulatory tone thickens as it progresses through 'Zana Aunty's' triumphs and travails, making us wonder who the real subject is.

The film also gives the impression that besides Briski, no one wants or is trying to improve the squalid scenario, that Indians are unaware and blind to the cancer within. The film's paternalistic tone has evoked a response here. Most Western reviewers have seen Briski's effort in the light she cast for them. The New York Times called the film "moving, charming and sad, a tribute to Ms Briski's indomitability and to the irrepressible creative spirits of the children themselves".

But Partha Banerjee, a New Jersey-based immigration advocate who interpreted hundreds of hours of tape for Briski from Bengali to English during the filming, was disturbed enough by the end-product to write to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last month raising questions about the film, including the unauthorised use of music from Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy. Having grown up in Calcutta, Banerjee is passionate about his city and incensed that the tireless work of other concerned citizens gets not even a fleeting mention. He says it is their work and organising prowess that keeps Sonagachi relatively free of hiv infections compared to other red-light areas in India.

Banerjee also says the children's lives are "worse" rather than better, thanks to Briski's intervention. "I visited these children a number of times over the last couple of years and found that almost all the children are now living a worse life than they were before Ms Briski began working with them," he wrote to the Academy. "The children's despair has exacerbated because they'd hoped that with active involvement in Ms Briski's camera project, there would be an opportunity for them to live a better life." Their parents believed their children would share some of the glory the filmmakers are now basking in, he said.

Banerjee told Outlook he doesn't begrudge Briski her fame, but he finds her treatment "sensational" as it is unbalanced and ultimately unfair. During the filming, Briski's relations with local activists worsened over many of her decisions. But do Briski and Kauffman have time to look back and analyse this? Not really.