Sky Neal and Kate McLarnon have made a sober, thoughtful documentary about Nepalese children and young girls who were trafficked to India, forced to work in circuses and abused by circus owners and others. The Indian government has now begun a process of liberating these young people, returning them to Nepal where they are reclaiming and detoxifying their experiences by setting up their own circus troupe called Circus Kathmandu, which tours internationally and is part of an educational project about trafficking.
Before the film arrives at the redemptive third act in its story, it is downbeat and sombre, and it does raise troubling thoughts about the unexamined role that coercion may actually have played in circuses throughout history – not just of animals but maybe humans as well. The film is most interesting, and emotionally painful, when it reunites these young women with their parents, whose reactions are very complex. They are quietly overwhelmed with guilt at having allowed the trafficking to happen in the first place: one mother says that the trafficker tricked them into thinking that their daughters would earn good money in India that they would send back and return in a year.
But the film suggests they are ambivalent at their abused children reviving circus skills as a force for good, as these are associated, in their minds, with betrayal. It is almost unbearably sad when a young woman actually asks her mother what happened: “Did someone take me, or … ?” and the older woman has to tell the story with quiet dignity, perhaps the first time she has had to say out loud what has troubled her for so long. A quietly valuable film.
