The Doon School Quintet

Directed by

David MacDougall

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This film series follows the daily lives of boys at an elite boarding school in India. It looks at their routines, friendships, and how the school shapes them.

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What happens

The Doon School Quintet is a five-part ethnographic film series made by the American visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker David MacDougall, between 1997 and 2000, at The Doon School, an elite all-boys boarding school in India. For thirteen months over three years, MacDougall lived with the students and was given unprecedented access for filming inside the residential campus. By the end, MacDougall had more than 85 hours of material, which he edited into 5 parts, with a total duration of about 8 hours. The project ranks among MacDougall's most ambitious and longest works and is the only film series in his oeuvre (the 1977-81 Turkana Conversations trilogy was co-directed with his work partner and wife, Judith MacDougall). The films were released between 2000 and 2004, and are titled Doon School Chronicles (2000), With Morning Hearts (2001), Karam in Jaipur (2001), The New Boys (2003), and The Age of Reason (2004). In addition to studying the boys' daily lives at Doon, considered the most prestigious boys' boarding school in India, the films examine the ideology and "social aesthetics" of the school, its mix of privilege and egalitarianism, and its role in Indian postcoloniality and the emergence of a new Indian elite. The films have been praised and noted for their significant contribution to the genres of anthropological documentary and ethnographic film. In 2005, anthropologist and professor at Temple University, Jay Ruby, described the project in the review paper The Last 20 years of Visual Anthropology: "MacDougall’s recent work on the Doon School in India and my digital ethnographic work on Oak Park (Ruby 2005) are attempts to continue an exploration that began with Rouch (Jean Rouch). The Doon School project in India by David MacDougall is perhaps the most noteworthy digital ethnographic film project." (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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