Gandhi's Children

One of the leading figures in visual anthropology and this year’s Robert Fulton Fellow at Harvard’s Film Study Center, David MacDougall (b. 1939) has made pioneering ethnographic films around the world, beginning with his earliest work shot in Africa in the early 1970s and finding special acclaim in the 1980s with a now-classic series of films, made together with his wife Judith, about the place of Kenya’s Turkana herders amidst the profound changes of post-colonial modernization. Renowned for their ability to select telling episodes of everyday life revealing the negotiation of social customs and practices, MacDougall’s films are celebrated for their intimate and compassionate understanding of their subjects. MacDougall, for example, refined the use of subtitles (rather than voiceover translation) in documentary to better convey the specificities of the individuals and communities he has filmed while also continuing to elaborate his methods through prolific writing on the practice and ethics of ethnographic work. Recent years have seen MacDougall drawn to India as a dominant focus and placing special emphasis on institutions for children and the experience of those growing up in them. While his major work from this period is the “Doon School Project,” a series of films shot at the eponymous and elite boarding school over the course of three years, MacDougall has recently completed a revealing sequel to this cycle, Gandhi’s Children, an epic documentary chronicle that examines life in a New Delhi shelter for homeless boys.