David MacDougall is an ethnographic filmmaker, scholar, and writer on cinema, the social sciences, and education. His first feature-length document, To Live With Herds, filmed in Uganda, won the Grand Prix Venezia Genti at the Venice Film Festival in 1972. Soon after, he and Judith produced the famous “Turkana Conversations” trilogy on semi-nomadic camel herders of northwestern Kenya. They then made a dozen films on indigenous communities in Australia.
This is the third film in the Turkana Conversations trilogy: it investigates the views of the Turkana, and especially Turkana women, on marriage and polygyny. As the plans for a marriage in a nearby homestead unfold, the film explores why a Turkana woman would want her husband to take a second (or third) wife, and how the system of polygyny…
The first film in the Turkana Conversations trilogy is a multifaceted portrait of Lorang, the head of the homestead and one of the important senior men of the Turkana. Because they are relatively isolated and self-sufficient, most Turkana (including Lorang’s son) see their way of life continuing unchanged into the future. But Lorang thinks otherwise, for he has seen something…