David MacDougall

MacDougall was born on November 12, 1939 in New Hampshire, United States, to a Canadian father and an American mother. He attended Dalton School in New York City till grade eighth and then transferred to The Putney School in Vermont. He went to Harvard University, where he received a bachelor's degree in English literature in 1961.[11] After Harvard, he enrolled in the ethnographic film program at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating in 1968. He remained there to pursue a Master of Arts in film studies, which he received in 1970.[1][12]

MacDougall began his career in 1972 when he made his first film To Live with Herds about the semi-nomadic pastoral Jie people in Uganda.[13] It won the Grand Prix "Venezia Genti" at the 1972 Venice Film Festival.[14] After this, MacDougall, along with his work partner and wife, Judith MacDougall, worked on the Turkana Conversations Trilogy.[15] The series investigated the lives of the Turkana people, semi-nomadic camel herders in Kenya.[16] Lorang's Way, released in 1977, was a portrait of the senior men of the Turkana, and won the first prize at the Cinéma du Réel in Paris in 1979.[17] The second film, The Wedding Camels, looks at the marriage of one of Lorang's daughters, and was awarded the Film Prize by the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1980.[18] After Africa, MacDougall's focus shifted to Australia, where he directed, or co-directed with his wife, a number of films on the indigenous communities, including Aboriginal Australians. These include films like Goodbye Old Man (1977), Takeover (1980), Stockman's Strategy (1984), and Link-Up Diary (1987).[19][20]

After Australia, MacDougall made the Photo Wallahs in India in 1991 with Judith. The subject was the photographers and photography in the Indian hill town of Mussoorie.[21] MacDougall said in an interview, "Our first plan for the film was to look for a place where one photographer served a small community - a town with a resident photographer...Perhaps we were naive in thinking such photographers actually existed. If a town was big enough to have a photographer at all, it had twenty...We ended up making the film in one of the most heterogeneous towns one could imagine, a hill station called Mussoorie."[22] In 2009, his film Gandhi's Children was nominated for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards.[23] The setting of the documentary was a shelter for abandoned, runaway, or orphan children on the outskirts of New Delhi, where MacDougall lived for several months.[24]

• MacDougall, David (1999). Transcultural Cinema. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691012346.
• MacDougall, David (2006). The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691121567.
• MacDougall, David (2019). The Looking Machine: Essays on Cinema, Anthropology and Documentary Filmmaking. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1526134110.

• To Live with Herds (1972)[26]
• Boran Women (1974) (co-directed with James Blue)
• Boran Herdsmen (1974) (co-directed with James Blue and Paul Baxter)
• Goodbye Old Man (1977)
• The Wedding Camels (1980) (co-directed with Judith MacDougall)
• Takeover (1980)
• Stockman's Strategy (1984)
• Link-Up Diary (1987)
• Photo Wallahs (1991) (co-directed with Judith MacDougall)
• Tempus de baristas (1993)
• The Doon School Quintet:

• Doon School Chronicles (2000)
• With Morning Hearts (2001)
• Karam in Jaipur (2001)
• The New Boys (2003)
• The Age of Reason (2004)

• SchoolScapes (2007)
• Gandhi’s Children (2008) (co-directed with Judith MacDougall)
• Awareness (2010) (co-directed with Judith MacDougall)
• Arnav at Six (2012)
• Under the Palace Wall (2014)

• Princeton University Press profile
• David MacDougall on IMDb