Resilience: Images from a New Delhi Children’s Shelter
Child Labourers by Kitchen
Where: NFSA Foyer Gallery
When: 9am - 5pm weekdays; 10am - 5pm weekends
Cost: Free
The NFSA gratefully acknowledges the support for this exhibition provided by the Freilich Foundation, Ronin Films and the Research School of Humanities, Australian National University.
'Video is evanescent, constantly tracing images that just as quickly disappear from the screen. Still images, on the other hand, give us moments when the future is just about to unfold. They carry the weight of the unknown future within them and become larger statements about society, history and human experience.'
- David MacDougall, 2009
David MacDougall is one of the world's most distinguished ethnographic and documentary film-makers. He is renowned for keenly observed films that evoke the sensory feel of everyday and institutional life. From his base in Canberra he has made a number of prize-winning films in Africa, Australia, Europe and India focusing on the social experience of people in diverse situations and cultures. Retrospectives of his work have been held in New York, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Freiburg, and Tokyo.
This series of prints by MacDougall, based on his recent film Gandhi's Children (2008), takes us beyond both observational cinema and photo-journalism, presenting the knowledge and resilience of individual boys and the rituals and rhythms of the institution they inhabit.
The NFSA gratefully acknowledges the support for this exhibition provided by the Freilich Foundation, Ronin Films and the Research School of Humanities, Australian National University.
David MacDougall
David MacDougall is a documentary filmmaker and writer on cinema. He was educated at Harvard University and the University of California at Los Angeles. His first feature-length film, To Live With Herds, filmed in Uganda, won the Grand Prix Venezia Genti at the Venice Film Festival in 1972.
Soon after this, he and his wife Judith MacDougall produced the Turkana Conversations trilogy of films on semi-nomadic camel herders of northwestern Kenya. Of these, Lorang’s Way won the prize of Cinéma du Réel in Paris in 1979, and The Wedding Camels the Film Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1980. With Judith MacDougall, he then co-directed a number of films on indigenous communities in Australia and, in 1991, a film on photographic practices in an Indian hill town, Photo Wallahs.
In 1993 he made Tempus de Baristas, on goat herders in the mountains of Sardinia, winner of the 1995 Earthwatch Film Award. In 1997 he began conducting a film study of the Doon School in northern India. This led to the making of five films: Doon School Chronicles (2000), With Morning Hearts (2001), Karam in Jaipur (2001), The New Boys (2003), and The Age of Reason (2004).
Recent projects include filming at a progressive, co-educational boarding school in South India. One of the resulting films, his experimental SchoolScapes (2007), won the Basil Wright Film Prize at the 2007 RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film. His latest film, Gandhi’s Children (2008), was made at a shelter for homeless children in New Delhi. MacDougall writes regularly on documentary and ethnographic cinema and is the author of Transcultural Cinema (Princeton University Press, 1998) and The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton, 2006).
He lives in Australia and is presently Adjunct Professor at the Research School of Humantities, Australian National University, Canberra.
Prayas Children's Home for Boys, New Delhi
Boys eat Chickpeas
The boys you see here still exist, but they are no longer the same. They have outgrown their images just as they have outgrown their clothes.
- David MacDougall, 2009
This shelter for children on the outskirts of Delhi provides food and accommodation for 350 boys. Some are orphans, others have been abandoned, while others have run away from home or are being detained for petty crimes under a magistrate's court order. David MacDougall lived at the institution for several months, exploring its routines and following the experiences of several boys. Despite the harshness of their lives, many show remarkable strength of character. One day 181 child labourers arrived, placing a seemingly impossible strain on the building's deteriorating facilities. The institution does what it can, but will it be enough?
The NFSA gratefully acknowledges the support for this exhibition provided by the Freilich Foundation, Ronin Films and the Research School of Humanities, Australian National University.
