Astra Film

This is the fifth and final film in the Doon School Quintet, an intimate study of India’s most prestigious boys’ boarding school. The school is India’s foremost boarding school for boys, and this film provides unique insights into the values and training of the Indian middle class and postcolonial elites more generally.

In this film MacDougall 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”.

Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) was a driven, charismatic, obsessive artist, a pioneer photographer who set out in 1900 to document traditional Indian life. He created an enormous body of work -- 10,000 recordings, 40,000 photographs, and a full length ethnographic motion picture. When Curtis began photographing Indians, he believed that their cultures were vanishing. When he finished in 1930, his own work vanished into obscurity, then was rediscovered in the 1970s and helped to inspire the revival of traditional culture on many reservations. Coming to Light tells the dramatic story of Curtis' life, the creation of his monumental work, and his changing views of the people he set out to document. The film also gives Indian people a voice in the discussion of Curtis' images. Descended from Curtis’ subjects or who are using his photographs for cultural preservation respond to the pictures, tell stories about the people in the photographs, and discuss the meaning of the images.

On the 18th February 2004, Jean Rouch was driving down a desert road together with his friend Damouré. Suddenly, out of the darkness, a trailer blocked their way.

The car drove straight into it, and Rouch died instantly. Worldwide, Jean Rouch is known to many as an anthropologist and innovative filmmaker. Much of his work is linked to the birth of cinéma vérité. However, Rouch's 50 year involvement with a particular group of people in Niger shines a more personal light on his work - one of friendship and collaboration. Together with this particular group of friends, Rouch has made numerous ethnographic films. Upon his arrival in 2004, they had yet another film in the works. Sadly, Lam Ibrahim Dia, a founding member of the group, had passed away in 2001.

The others, namely Damouré, Moussa and Tallou, were eagerly awaiting Rouch's return. The year prior to Rouch's death, the authors went to Niger to make a film with his friends. They were curious to know how Rouchţs friends had experienced all these years of working with him and the cinema. Unaware of Rouch's fate a year later, these friends joined the authors on a journey to explore this unique collaboration that changed their lives.

This documentary chronicles the rarely told narratives of Gypsy survivors of Nazi persecution in Romania as they remember their experiences during WWII in the context of their lives today. During WWII, Gypsies were slated alongside Jews and other populations for extermination. In each country occupied or allied with Nazi Germany, their fate was similar. Nearly 500,000 are supposed to have perished due to systematic extermination, forced marches, starvation, exposure, diseases, and abuses. Romania, The Gypsies' experience critically altered their lives.  Survivors share with viewers their shocking deportation from Romania to camps where they fought to survive by any means necessary. Hidden Sorrows reveals the continued struggle of Gypsies for equality in a society that views them as second-class citizens. It examines the present impoverishment of the survivors and their descendants as well as discrimination facing them daily.

The story of two Hindu sadhus, Uma and Vasisth Giri, one a Swedish woman, the other a 29 year old Indian. Together they go on a pilgrimage of self-discovery into the high Himalayas to the source of the River Ganges, searching out the saints and mystics of Hinduism. They meet a sadhu who has not spoken a word for 12 years. They spend days living in the caves and huts of reclusive ascetics. After 27 years of searching Uma finally discovers the spiritual master she has always been searching for.