The Age of Reason

This is the fifth and final film in David MacDougall's Doon School Quintet, an intimate 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. The film explores the thoughts and feelings of Abhishek, a 12-year-old from Nepal, during his first days and weeks as a Doon student. This is at once the story of the encounter between a filmmaker and his subject and a glimpse of the mind of a child at "the age of reason.

David MacDougall

David MacDougall is a documentary filmmaker and writer on cinema. His first feature-length film, "To Live With Herd"s, filmed in Uganda, won the Grand Prix Venezia Genti at the Venice Film Festival in 1972. Soon after, 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. Since 1997 he has been conducting a film study of the Doon School in northern India. This has resulted in five films: "Doon School Chronicles" (2000), "With Morning Hearts" (2001), "Karam in Jaipur" (2001), "The New Boys" (2003), and "The Age of Reason" (2004). MacDougall writes regularly on documentary and ethnographic cinema and is the author of Transcultural Cinema (Princeton, 1998) and the forthcoming The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. He is presently a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University.

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