"The New Boys"
by
David MacDougall
SYNOPSIS
| This landmark documentary is the fourth film in ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall's long-term study of childhood and adolescence at the Doon School in Northern India. This film focuses on life in a school dormitory. A new group of 12-year-old students is arriving to start their lives at the school. The film follows them from their first day, exploring their emotional and intellectual lives as they experience homesickness, fights, classroom teaching, and the stirrings of group identity. Although these boys are the same age as those in the earlier With Morning Hearts, the group dynamics captured here are very different from that film. Within the group are boys of varied personalities and backgrounds - some natural leaders, some subject to teasing and bullying, some argumentative, some peace-makers... Especially notable are the conversations among the boys about such matters as the causes of aggression and warfare, homesickness, restaurant food, and even how to speak to a ghost. Through exploring the contexts of conflict, loneliness, confidence, trust, and friendship, the film evocatively captures children's strategies of negotiating a world where belonging cannot be taken for granted. This is a poignant document of young lives manoeuvring between personal anxiety and worldly confidence, at once reflective and entangled in the moment. |
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