Global and Development 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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Archeology of Memory: Villa Grimaldi
This beautifully crafted, poignant, and timely documentary explores the power of art to heal the trauma of torture. The film follows exiled Chilean musician Quique Cruz from the San Francisco Bay Area to Chile and back as he creates a multimedia installation and musical suite in an effort to heal the emotional wounds inflicted on him by the state-sponsored torture of the Pinochet regime.
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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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Between Light and Shadow: Maya Women in Transition
This vibrant, wide-ranging documentary examines the impact on contemporary Maya culture of changes in the lives and expectations of Maya women in Guatemala.
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Birdsong and Coffee: A Wake Up Call
This incisive and multifaceted documentary powerfully demonstrates how coffee drinkers in this and other developed countries hold in their hands the fate of farm families, farming communities, and entire ecosystems in coffee-growing regions worldwide.
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Butte, America
This "beautifully told and eye-opening account of the legacy of industrial mining in the American West" recounts the sometimes glorious, often sorrowful, but always fascinating story of Butte, Montana, once the world’s largest producer of copper.
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California and the American Dream
This incisive, thought-provoking four-part series explores the dynamics of culture, community, and identity in California, one of the most diverse places in the world. Each film provides a trenchant and highly discussible case study of divergent California social trends that are keenly evident all across America.
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California’s “Lost” Tribes
This insightful documentary explores the conflicts over Indian gaming and places them in the context of both California and Native American history. The film examines the historical underpinnings of tribal sovereignty and the evolution of tribal gaming rights. It illustrates the impact of gaming on Indian self-determination, and the challenges that Native people face in defining the identity of their people for the future.
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Cashing in on Culture: Indigenous Communities and Tourism
This insightful documentary, filmed in the small tropical forest community of Capirona, in Ecuador, serves as an incisive case study of the many issues and potential problems surrounding eco- and ethnic tourism.
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Celebrating Semana Santa: Change, Conflict, and Continuity in Rural Honduras
This "superb, thought-provoking" ethnographic documentary explores the vitality and controversies surrounding a remarkable syncretic religious ceremony held in neighboring remote villages in rural Honduras during the Easter Holy Week.
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Dakar to Port Loko: Perspectives from West Africa
This wide-ranging, richly discussible documentary provides an unparalleled opportunity to experience everyday West African life and viewpoints from the ground level.
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Dance With the Wodaabes
This widely acclaimed and visually stunning ethnographic documentary explores, from the point of view of its participants, the complex cultural significance of one of Africa’s most spectacular but frequently misunderstood and sensationalized ritual celebrations.
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Dancing with the Incas
This extraordinary film documents the most popular music of the Andes — Huayno music — and explores the lives of three Huayno musicians in a contemporary Peru torn between the military and the Shining Path guerrillas.
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Daughters of Ixchel: Maya Thread of Change
This illuminating documentary explores the lives of Maya women today, portrays their ancient weaving processes, and examines the economic, political, and cultural forces that are profoundly affecting the women and their weaving.
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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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The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy
This exceptional and compelling documentary, narrated by Alec Baldwin, examines the life and legacy of legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky.
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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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Discovering Dominga
This unforgettably dramatic and powerful documentary relates the extraordinary story of a young Iowa housewife who discovers she is a survivor of one of the most horrific massacres in Guatemalan history, committed in 1982 against Maya Indian villagers. The film follows her remarkable journey of transformation and discovery as she returns to Guatemala in search of her heritage and ultimately joins efforts to bring the perpetrators of the massacre to justice.
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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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Festive Land: Carnaval in Bahia
This perceptive and engaging documentary examines one of the largest and most extraordinary popular celebrations in the world, the week-long Carnaval that brings more than two million people to the streets of Salvador, the capital of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil.
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From Our Strength: Birth and Indigenous Politics in Cañar, Ecuador
This unique ethnographic case study, filmed in the beautiful and diverse southern Andes of Ecuador, explores the complex relationships between indigenous politics, social change, and health-care choices.
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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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Gringo Kullki: Sucres to Dollars in Ecuador
This “thought-provoking and insightful documentary” explores, from an indigenous people’s viewpoint, Ecuador’s difficult transition from the national currency of the sucre to the U.S. dollar beginning in 2000.
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In and Out of Africa
This extraordinary documentary is one of the most intelligent, perceptive, and engaging films ever made on African culture and art. It explores with irony and humor issues of authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the transnational trade in African art.
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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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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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Laid to Waste
This acclaimed documentary is the best case study of environmental injustice and racism available on video. It exposes the ugly underbelly of environmental racism and provides an excellent illustration of grassroots organizing and networking.
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The Last Stand: Ancient Redwoods and the Bottom Line
This powerful and thought-provoking documentary explores the dramatic history of the 15-year battle to save the last remaining ancient redwoods in northern California’s Headwaters Forest. This riveting history is one of junk bonds and endangered salmon, car bombs and clear-cuts, corporate takeovers, collusion, corruption, greed, and murder. It is also one of courage and conviction, vision and values.
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The Last Zapatista
This remarkable documentary examines the profound and enduring legacy of Emiliano Zapata in contemporary Mexico. The film focuses on Emeterio Pantaleon, a 97-year-old Mexican farmer and one of the last living veterans who fought with Zapata during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920.
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Losing Knowledge: 50 Years of Change
This profound ethnographic documentary explores the myriad of ways in which centuries-old indigenous knowledge is rapidly vanishing in the southern Mexican village of Talea, Oaxaca, and by extension throughout the world.
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Mas Fever: Inside Trinidad Carnival
Carnival in the New World is a synthesis of European elements — Christian traditions and the masquerade — and African elements — primarily music and dance. In Trinidad, Carnival is a colorful, exuberant celebration of national focus and pride.
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Men at Work: Voices from Detroit’s Underground Economy
Detroit, which recently came in first on Forbes magazine’s “Miserable Cities Index,” is viewed as the national reference point for all that has gone wrong in urban America. But abandonment and decay are not the only stories in the poorest, most dramatically shrinking major American city. Detroit is also a tale of ingenuity and reinvention born of necessity. This is the story of how, in an economic climate apparently designed to ensure their failure, some resilient men find work on their own terms, get food and shelter, and raise their children -often making up the means to do so as they go along.
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Mi Puerto Rico
This wide-ranging and much-honored documentary explores Puerto Rico’s rich cultural traditions and untold history, revealing the remarkable stories of its revolutionaries and abolitionists, poets and patriots.
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Mined to Death
Working at an elevation of 16,000 feet, Quechua-speaking miners in Potosi, Bolivia, dig out zinc, tin, and silver much like their Incan ancestors did more than five centuries ago. This poignant documentary explores the lives and work of the miners as the veins of ore in the sacred mountain they are mining become increasingly depleted and ever more difficult to discover and remove.
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Monti Moments: Men’s Memories in the Heart of Rome
This rich and revelatory documentary provides a uniquely intimate portrait of social change in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Rome.
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Mountain Music of Peru
This classic documentary on the centuries-old music of the Andes demonstrates the importance or the region’s musical heritage in preserving the cultural identity of the impoverished native peoples.
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My Louisiana Love
Every few years a new documentary comes along that so powerfully resonates both emotionally and intellectually that it can truly be deemed unforgettable. “My Louisiana Love” is such a film. This profoundly poignant exploration of environmental injustice and loss focuses a revelatory light on an otherwise invisible American tragedy.
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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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The New Los Angeles
This engaging documentary explores the complexities of inclusion in Los Angeles — the nation’s largest "majority-minority" city and the city with the nation’s largest divide between rich and poor.
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Orphans of Mathare
This powerful documentary examines the lives of former street children now living at the Good Samaritan Children’s Home, an orphanage and school in the sprawling Mathare slum of Nairobi, Kenya. Although it focuses on one orphanage in Mathare, the film lays bare the complicated relationship between poverty, violence, disease, Christianity, tradition, and the orphan crisis in Kenya and throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
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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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The Price of Renewal
What are the challenges in crafting a vibrant urban village from an ethnically, culturally, and economically diverse population? This perceptive documentary examines complex issues of community development, philanthropy, and civic engagement by chronicling the long-term redevelopment of an older, deteriorating neighborhood called City Heights, often referred to as the Ellis Island of San Diego.
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Q’eros: The Shape of Survival
This classic documentary, by renowned filmmaker John Cohen, provides a multifaceted exploration of the way of life of the Q’eros Indians of Peru, who have lived in the Andes for more than 3,000 years.
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Rancho California (Por Favor)
This thought-provoking, widely acclaimed visual essay provides a troubling journey through migrant farmworker camps in suburban southern California.
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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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Ripe for Change
This fascinating documentary explores the intersection of food and politics in California over the last 30 years. It illuminates the complex forces struggling for control of the future of California’s agriculture, and provides provocative commentary by a wide array of eloquent farmers, prominent chefs, and noted authors and scientists.
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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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Sanpachando: St. Pacho Is for the Revelers
This exceptional and engaging documentary is an important contribution to the growing body of work on the African Diaspora and Latin America. It perceptively explores the intertwined cultural, religious, political, and afro-ethnic meanings of a vibrant festival honoring St. Francis of Assisi in Quibdo, Choco, on the northwest Pacific coast of Colombia.
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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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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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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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Tempus de Baristas
"Time of the Barmen" is one of the most acclaimed works of renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall. It profiles three goatherders in the mountains of eastern Sardinia and, with extraordinary insight and nuance, explores a traditional way of life that is rapidly disappearing as commercial farming displaces herding and young people drift to the coast for the higher pay and glamour of the tourism industry.
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To Catch a Dollar: Muhammad Yunus Banks on America
This thought-provoking and powerful documentary follows Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus as he brings his revolutionary microfinance program to the United States, establishing Grameen America. The first stop: Queens, New York, 2008, just as the financial crisis explodes and the American economy plummets.
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To Live With Herds
This classic film on the Jie of Uganda, produced by the renowned ethnographic filmmaking team of David and Judith MacDougall, explores life in a traditional Jie homestead during a harsh dry season.
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The Toured: The Other Side of Tourism in Barbados
Tourism is the second-largest industry in the world and the "touristic encounter" may be the most important contact front today between differing cultures. But such encounters, especially between people of the First and Third worlds, are often characterized by strikingly unequal power relations.
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Trees Tropiques
This innovative and thought-provoking documentary subtly explores the difficult issues that arise when the ethics of deforestation and the ethnographic encounter intersect. The film incisively poses the question: “Who has the right to cut… both trees and film footage?”
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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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Voices of the Sierra Tarahumara
This powerful and eye-opening documentary examines the plight of the indigenous Tarahumara people of northern Mexico, who are oppressed by criminal drug lords and and trapped in a web of rampant deforestation, crippling drug wars, and governmental corruption.
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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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Womanhood and Circumcision: Three Maasai Women Have Their Say (Extended Version, 2014)
This thought-provoking and much-acclaimed documentary sensitively explores the cultural context of female genital-cutting practices among the Maasai. The film was re-edited with extensive new material and an additional half-hour of extra commentary in 2014. It will stimulate discussion and reflection in a wide variety of courses in cultural anthropology, women’s and gender studies, African studies, and development studies.
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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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