A YOGA DOCUMENTARY

It was all supposed to be fairly simple for filmmaker and yoga enthusiast Kate Churchill.

The idea for her documentary, Enlighten Up, was to take an average yoga skeptic and put him through a six month experiment during which they would travel the world meeting yogis and yoga practitioners, and gain an understanding and an appreciation.

Nick Rosen, 29, was the skeptic chosen to be front and center in Kate Churchill's documentary Enlighten Up, an examination of yoga.

'I think I started from a pretty naive and idealistic point. I really believed, in six months, if we could go anywhere in the world, that something dramatic and radical would happen,' Churchill said during a phone interview. 'No matter who the person was, no matter how skeptical he was, it was inevitable that something would happen. I had this blind enthusiasm, in a way.'

Not everything went according to plan. Churchill's subject was Nick Rosen, a 29 year old journalist from New York who seemed suitable enough. But through a series of beginning yoga classes and interviews with experts, his appreciation was only mild and Churchill's own perspective was becoming clouded.

'I liked that he was a skeptic, because I had such certainty that we were going to embark on this very life changing trip that it was a way to kind of stack the deck,' she said. 'I really liked that he was a journalist because I thought his journalistic skills would be a great collaborator for researching the subject and investigating that.'

Overall, Enlighten Up took more than five years to complete, much of that consumed by postproduction. The six month journey itself took the pair from New York to Los Angeles, Hawaii and India.

The film includes not only footage and firsthand accounts of Rosen's immersion into the world of yoga, but excerpts from interviews with yogis about enlightenment and the supposed transformative spiritual power of yoga.

After a while, however, Rosen isn't buying into the powers of the downward facing dog and Churchill isn't happy with the vague and sometimes conflicting answers from her hand picked experts.

By Todd Jorgenson

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