Asian/Pacific Studies
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The Age of Reason
This is the fifth and final film in renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall’s “Doon School Quintet,”his long-term study of India’s most prestigious boys’ boarding school. In this film he focuses on the life of one student whom he discovers at the school.
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Anonymously Yours
This extraordinary documentary on sex-trafficking in Southeast Asia interweaves four young women’s stories to reveal an institution that enslaves as many as 40 million women worldwide.
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Arnav at Six
This unique documentary is a compelling collaborative effort by Arnav Koshy, a six-year-old boy living in the Andhra Pradesh region of South India, and renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall. The film explores the mind and varied activities of the keenly observant and intelligent Arnav.
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The Art of Regret
This brilliant and keenly observed documentary, by renowned ethnographic filmmaker Judith MacDougall, explores the digital revolution in China, where photography is known as the “art of regret.”
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Awareness
This extraordinarily intimate and illuminating documentary, by renowned ethnographic filmmakers David and Judith MacDougall, continues David's compelling exploration of education and adolescent life in India's Rishi Valley School.
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Beijing
Conveys the texture and flavor of the venerable Chinese capital through a close-up look at a number of its inhabitants, both young and old, with varied and fascinating backgrounds. Their stories unfold against the backdrop of a timeless but rapidly changing metropolis.
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Between Two Worlds: A Japanese Pilgrimage
For centuries, pilgrims have come to the Japanese island of Shikoku to trace the 1,000-mile route known as the “Pilgrimage to the 88 Sacred Places of Shikoku,” a journey believed to have been first undertaken by Kobo Daishi, founder of Buddhism’s Shingon sect in the ninth century.
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Delhi at Eleven
This stunningly original and thought-provoking documentary, which was produced by renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall, presents the work of four 11-year-old filmmakers living in New Delhi, India.
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Destination: Tourism
This thought-provoking documentary explores the complex, interconnected effects of tourism, globalization, culture, philanthropy, and religion in Bodh Gaya, the world’s most popular destination of Buddhist pilgrimage.
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Diya
This innovative ethnographic documentary by renowned filmmaker Judith MacDougall follows the life history of an important cultural object through the everyday experiences of the people who make, sell, and use it.
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Doon School Chronicles
This intimate and groundbreaking study of India’s most prestigious boys’ boarding school is the first work in a series of five acclaimed films by renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall.
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The Doon School Quintet
This groundbreaking, five-part study of India’s most prestigious boys’; boarding school is a contemporary masterwork of renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall. Sometimes called “the Eton of India,” Doon School has developed its own characteristic style and presents a curious mixture of privilege and egalitarianism. Each of the five films can stand on its own but taken together as a series the five films provide a unique and revelatory cultural portrait that will take its place among the classics of ethnographic cinema.
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Eleven in Delwara
This film presents the work of eight young filmmakers, all about eleven years old, in the village of Delwara in southern Rajasthan, India. Three films are included; one is a collaboration by all eight children and two are by individuals. The three films together provide an extraordinary view of contemporary Indian village life.
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Eleven in Kolkata
This film presents the work of four 11-year-old filmmakers in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), West Bengal. The four girls took part in a video workshop at the Teesta Home, a small foster home. The three films they made explore the textures and events of their daily lives in the orphanage, focusing on play, study, their personal relationships, and their hopes and dreams for the future.
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The Family Table
The contrasting lives of two families — a traditional four-generation rural family in a Sichuan village and a modern, single-child family in urban Hangzhou — are viewed through the routines of their daily meals. In the process, the film illustrates how the Chinese family has endured and how it is changing.
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Food for Body and Spirit
The Tao of cooking and eating — the Way to health and well-being! This film investigates the impact of religious influences on Chinese culture and cuisine.
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Gandhi’s Children
This unforgettable documentary feature film by renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall explores the life of children in a shelter for orphans and juvenile detainees in a poor area of New Delhi. Despite the harshness of their lives, many of these boys show remarkable strength of character, knowledge, and resilience. Often left to their own devices, they institute a seemingly arbitrary set of checks and balances to make sense of the chaos around them.
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Ganges: River to Heaven
This extraordinary documentary explores with unparalleled intimacy one of the most cherished of Hindu religious aspirations: to die in the city of Varanasi, on the banks of the sacred Ganges, in the faith that dying here assures liberation from the cycle of earthly life.
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The Great Ceremony to Straighten the World
Caught between the seduction of prosperity and the threat of cultural disintegration, the people of Bali engage in ceremonies. Through them, the Balinese attempt to maintain balance with God, nature, and one another, and also to turn the recent prosperity from the booming tourist trade into a way of invigorating their culture.
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The Great Gathering
This remarkable documentary provides a rare and fascinating study of the history, meaning, and diverse participants of the Maha Kumbha Mela, a spectacular Hindu sacred festival held every twelve years on the banks of the Ganges in India.
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Indelible Lalita
This intimate, poignant, and thought-provoking documentary relates the remarkable story of an Indian woman, Lalita Bharvani, who completely loses her skin pigment as she migrates from Bombay to Montreal. Now 60 and appearing to be White, Lalita copes with her changing identity even as her body is painfully transformed by ovarian cancer, breast cancer, and heart failure. In telling Lalita’s story, the film incisively explores the intersection of racial, national, age, and gender identities in the globalized world.
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Kahyangan: The Balinese Journey of the Soul
This remarkable documentary explores the full cycle of Balinese death rituals that support and protect the soul’s journey in its endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
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Kamakha Through Prayerful Eyes
This "finely crafted, lyrical exploration of a sacred site" creatively captures the complexity and mystery surrounding Kamakhya Temple, an ancient place of fertility worship in India’s northeastern state of Assam. This temple is unique among Hindu temples of the Devi (the Goddess) in that it enshrines no image of Her.
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Karam in Jaipur
This absorbing documentary is the third film in renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall’s long-term, five-part study of childhood and adolescence at the Doon School in northern India.
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Kawitan: Creating Childhood in Bali
This informative documentary systematically examines the key Balinese early-life ceremonies at every social level in South Bali.
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Keep Her Under Control: Law’s Patriarchy in India
This provocative documentary, which explores the role of women in a Muslim-dominated village in Rajasthan, in northern India, is original, compelling, and instructive, and it is sure to stimulate discussion and analysis in any course that studies gender roles, Islam, India, or cultural anthropology.
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Kotla Walks: Performing Locality
This engaging documentary explores the changing urban life of a contemporary India caught between local tradition and the effects of globalization. The film provides a richly detailed portrait of the lives of residents of Kotla Mubarakpur, an "urban village" in South Delhi, by focusing on one family and their friends and neighbors.
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Marriages in Heaven
Arranged marriages have been an important aspect of traditional Indian culture since ancient times, and they are still common today. This illuminating documentary explores the ways in which globalization and modernization are affecting young people and changing the traditions of marriage among Indians living both in India and in America.
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Masters of the Wok
Like Chinese cuisine and Chinese culture, this film is a study in contrasts. It explores the evolution of Chinese cuisine from basic peasant fare to highly refined and lavish imperial cooking.
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Monkey Dance (PBS Version)
This extraordinary documentary provides an illuminating and richly discussible case study of immigrant acculturation in contemporary America.
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Monkey Dance (Director’s Version)
This extraordinary documentary provides an illuminating and richly discussible case study of immigrant acculturation in contemporary America.
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The Myth of the Buddha’s Birthplace
This fascinating and thought-provoking documentary explores the process by which a modern myth is created. The film illustrates how the people in a small village in eastern India have come to believe that the Buddha was born in their village, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
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The New Boys
This landmark documentary is the fourth film in renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall’s long-term, five-part study of childhood and adolescence at the Doon School in northern India.
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农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness
This colorful, entertaining, gently ironic documentary presents a vivid and sensitive portrait of a side of China that is little known outside the country: the world of ethnic tourism. In recent years, hundreds of millions of Chinese tourists, mostly city-dwellers, have used their newly increased incomes to travel. And many of the places they visit are ethnic minority villages in China’s West and Southwest.
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Photo Wallahs
Renowned ethnographic filmmakers David and Judith MacDougall explore the many meanings of photography in this profound and award-winning documentary set in India.
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Primates Like Us
In 1998 a group of primarily American undergraduate students went to Bali as part of a new Balinese Macaque Project field school to experience Balinese culture, study macaque monkey behavior and document the process with on-location video footage. After compiling and reviewing the footage, however, it became clear that what was actually captured was an ethnographic account of a group of undergraduates who were experiencing simultaneously a new culture, the rigors of anthropological fieldwork, and the conflicts of living and working with each other as a team.
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The Reincarnation of Khensur Rinpoche
This utterly fascinating and compelling film follows the search of Choenzey, a 47-year-old Tibetan monk who lives in exile in a Buddhist monastery in southern India, to find the reincarnation of his deceased master, Khensur Rinpoche. Choenzey’s search and eventual discovery is of an impish but gentle four-year-old who is recognized by the Dalai Lama to be the looked-for reincarnation.
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Roots of Health
This thought-provoking and insightful documentary employs incisive case studies from around the world to explore how people’s health and well-being is primarily determined by where they live, their educational, social, and economic status, and the degree of control they have over their lives.
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Salsa in Japan: A Japanese and Latino Mix
This remarkable documentary on multiculturalism explores the growing subculture of salsa dancing in Japan, where salsa dancing and salsa clubs serve as a source of interaction and cultural mingling between native Japanese and Latino immigrants to Japan.
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Sand Painting: Sacred Art of Tibet
In this beautifully photographed and fascinating documentary, Tibetan monks from the Dalai Lama’s personal monastery, Namgyal, create the mandala of Kalachakra, the most sacred of all Buddhist sand paintings.
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SchoolScapes
Inspired by the cinema of Lumiere and the ideas of the 20th-century Indian thinker Krishnamurti, renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall explores a famous progressive co-educational school in South India. This innovative film is dedicated to the simple act of looking.
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The Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet
Featuring unique archival footage and exclusive interviews with former Tibetan resistance fighters and surviving CIA operatives, this powerful documentary reveals for the first time a hitherto unknown chapter in Tibet’s recent history.
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Singing Sentiment
This "beautifully evocative portrait" documents the life and activities of elderly quan ho folk singer, Nguyen Thi Ban, in Diem Village, Bac Ninh Province, northern Vietnam.
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Sisters and Daughters Betrayed
Sex trafficking is a global crisis of growing dimensions. Millions of women and young girls have been illegally transported from rural to urban areas and across national borders for the purpose of prostitution. This compelling video explores the social and economic forces that drive this lucrative underground trade, and the devastating impact it has on women’s lives.
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Six Billion and Beyond
This thought-provoking documentary is, stated simply, the best and most comprehensive introduction available on video to the interconnected issues of population growth, economic development, equal rights and opportunities for women, and environmental protection around the world.
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Sixteen Decisions
This remarkable documentary explores the human face of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh’s micro-lending experiment of small business loans, usually of $100 or less, that has transformed the lives of millions of Third-World women and their families.
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Some Alien Creatures
In this carefully observed and richly nuanced film about a progressive co-educational boarding school in South India, young boys and girls jokingly accuse each other of being like "alien creatures." In exploring this gender divide, renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall examines the lives of three boys at the school.
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Some Na Ceremonies
The Na people (also known as Moso) of southwest China are best known in the West for their matrilineal kinship system. Western representations of Na culture usually overlook the significance of religion, a central aspect in the lives of Na people. This richly detailed documentary, created by two Na filmmakers and produced by an American anthropologist, consists of five short pieces that capture important Na ceremonies.
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A Stranger in My Native Land
This profound, poetic, and ultimately immensely sad documentary may be the first of its kind about Tibet — a vivid personal account of loss and disappointment as an exile discovers his country for the first time.
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Suzhou
Known for centuries as the center of Chinese culture and aesthetics, this Yangzi delta city has often been called the "Venice of the East" because of its many canals and bridges. This beautifully filmed portrait of the city leads the viewer through markets and teahouses, sweet shops and bookstores, rice paddies and fish stalls, and two of Suzhou’s exquisite gardens.
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Taksu: Music in the Life of Bali
This sensitive documentary is an American musician’s unique portrait of Balinese life, art, and spirituality.
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The Thread of Karma
In 1991, filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam made "The Reincarnation of Khensur Rinpoche," which followed the search of a Tibetan monk, named Choenzey, to find the reincarnation of his recently deceased master, Khensur Rinpoche. Sixteen years later, the directors revisit the reincarnation at Drepung Monastery in South India, where he has been brought up within the age-old traditions of Tibetan Buddhist monastic life.
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The Trials of Telo Rinpoche
This absorbing documentary portrait tells the amazing story of Telo Rinpoche, a.k.a. Eddie Ombadykow, a 21-year-old American from Philadelphia whose favorite band is The Smashing Pumpkins. He is also a Buddhist monk who was brought up in a Tibetan monastery in India from the age of seven and who was recognized by the Dalai Lama as an important reincarnate lama, or spiritual master.
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Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response to Colonialism (Digitally Remastered Version)
One of the world’s best-known and most honored ethnographic films, this classic documentary depicts the many modifications made by Trobriand Islanders, in Papua New Guinea, to the traditional British game of cricket.
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Under the Palace Wall
Noted ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall here employs a masterful series of precisely observed scenes to explore the local primary school and contemporary village life of Delwara, in southern Rajasthan, India.
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Water Farmers
The Yangzi River delta region south of Shanghai is known as the water country. Hundreds of miles of canals traverse the land, linking towns and villages. Here, near the city of Shaoxing, water has completely shaped the local farmers’ unique way of life.
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Water Puppetry in Vietnam: An Ancient Tradition in a Modern World
This insightful and original ethnographic documentary explores the complex interplay between the rise and development of the international tourism industry and the production of culture in the performance of Vietnamese water puppetry.
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With Morning Hearts
This new documentary by renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall continues his long-term study of the Doon School. "With Morning Hearts" focuses on a group of twelve-year-olds during their first year in one of the "houses" for new boys.
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A World Without Strangers
This engaging and innovative documentary explores the common misperceptions and stereotypes of one another shared by young people in the Middle East and the United States. It connects five college-age women from the United States with five from the Middle East in a media-based dialogue that illuminates and challenges cross-cultural misconceptions.
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Xian
This wide-ranging documentary presents a cultural history of the ancient Chinese imperial city, once the greatest capital in the world and the Eastern terminus of the famed Silk Road.
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