MacDougall began his career in 1972 when he made his first film
To Live with Herds about the semi-nomadic pastoral
Jie people in
Uganda. It won the Grand Prix "Venezia Genti" at the 1972
Venice Film Festival. After this, MacDougall, along with his work partner and wife, Judith MacDougall, worked on the
Turkana Conversations Trilogy. The series investigated the lives of the
Turkana people, semi-nomadic camel herders in
Kenya. ''Lorang's Way
, released in 1979, was a portrait of a senior man of the Turkana, and won the first prize at the Cinéma du Réel in Paris in 1979. The second film, The Wedding Camels'', looks at the marriage of one of Lorang's daughters, and was awarded the Film Prize of the
Royal Anthropological Institute in 1980. After Africa, MacDougall's focus shifted to Australia, where he directed, or co-directed with his wife, ten films on Aboriginal Australian communities for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. These include
Goodbye Old Man (1977),
Takeover (1980), ''Stockman's Strategy
(1984), and Link-Up Diary'' (1987). After Australia, MacDougall made
Photo Wallahs in India in 1991 with Judith. The subject was photographers and photography in the Indian hill town of
Mussoorie. MacDougall said in an interview, "Our first plan for the film was to look for a place where one photographer served a small community - a town with a resident photographer...Perhaps we were naive in thinking such photographers actually existed. If a town was big enough to have a photographer at all, it had twenty...We ended up making the film in one of the most heterogeneous towns one could imagine, a hill station called Mussoorie." In 1993 he made
Tempus de Baristas about mountain shepherds in Sardinia, produced by the Instituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico and the BBC, and awarded the 1995 Earthwatch Film Award. In 2009, his film ''Gandhi's Children'' was nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film at the
Asia Pacific Screen Awards. The setting of the documentary was a shelter for abandoned, runaway, or orphaned children on the outskirts of
New Delhi, where MacDougall lived for several months.
The Doon School Quintet Between 1996 and 2003, MacDougall worked on one of his most ambitious projects,
The Doon School Quintet, a five-part ethnographic film series that was a long-term visual study of
The Doon School, a boys' boarding school in the North Indian town of
Dehradun. The then headmaster,
John Mason, gave MacDougall unprecedented access for filming, and he stayed on campus with the boys between 1997 and 2000. From over eighty-five hours of collected material, he produced five documentary films, edited and released between 2000 and 2004. They studied the daily lives of the boys, the social aesthetics of the school, its rituals, traditions, material culture and language. "My primary interest in the school was as a crossing place for people from different backgrounds, how they got on with each other across class lines," MacDougall said in an interview. "But in the process of working on it, I actually became much more interested in the school as a kind of social organism, a micro-society with its own rules and rituals, and the films ended up being about the experience of students growing up in this kind of institution where they had to learn a whole new game plan, different from their previous lives which had been living within their family." MacDougall went on to make film studies of two further institutions for children in India, the Rishi Valley School in South India and the Prayas Children’s Home for Boys in New Delhi. From 2011 to 2017 he directed the 6-year “Childhood and Modernity” project in India in which different groups of children conducted research in their own communities using video cameras. It produced over 20 short films, 12 of which are presented in the DVD production,
The Child’s Eye (2018). ==Honours==