Constructing the Self, Constructing Others: David MacDougall’s Observational Films on Institutions for Children in India

Abstract

Black waters gushing out of sewage pipes into an open field. Lumps of human faeces floating in choked lavatories. Children peering out through the cracked glasses of rusted windows. These images recur in Gandhi’s Children, ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall’s 2008 film about a shelter home and juvenile detention center for homeless and orphaned children in New Delhi. We could dismiss these as stereotypical images of poverty and destitution from the third world, but in Gandhi’s Children, which documents everyday life at the shelter, these recurrent images expose the viewer to the sensory extremities the shelter’s inmates face on a daily basis. The inmates are destitute children: lost, abandoned, runaway, ailing, criminal, violent — and equally, if not more often, violated themselves. Gandhi’s Children follows these inmates’ life stories and their experiences at the shelter. This is not done in a conventional voiceover-led, expository style of documentary. The film is shot principally from within the shelter and, using the principles of observational cinema, MacDougall follows the everyday goings-on here.