Enlighten Up!, a documentary film about a skeptic's journey into the world of yoga, will open on April 1 at New York’s IFC Film Center. The film takes a fresh look at yoga through the curious but irreverent eyes of a 29 year-old journalist, Nick Rosen, as documented by Kate Churchill, a filmmaker and yoga devotee.
Kate believes yoga can transform anyone—even Nick. Nick signs on to investigate yoga for six months, intrigued by the opportunity to delve inside a discipline practiced by some 16 million Americans and fueling a 5.7 billion dollar industry in the U.S. alone. But before he can say OM, he finds himself twisted up like a pretzel, surrounded by celebrity yogis, true believers, kooks, entrepreneurs and a gentle teacher from Brazil who leads his class with his feet behind his head.
The more Nick investigates yoga, the more contradictions he discovers, leading him to question whether yoga is anything more than a workout. As Nick searches for concrete facts and discards the lofty spiritual theories of his yoga teachers, he strays further from a transformation, which threatens to foil Kate’s original plan.
Kate and Nick’s Enlighten Up! road trip takes them from New York City to Hawaii to India, where they visit yoga’s most renowned teachers as well as a few unusual practitioners, including B.K.S. Iyengar of Iyengar Yoga (named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine); Pattabhi Jois of the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute; Norman Allen of Hawaii; Sharon Gannon and David Life of Jivamukti Yoga in New York City; Dharma Mittra of Dharma Mittra Yoga; former pro wrestler turned yoga teacher Diamond Dallas Page; Dr. Madan Kataria of Laughing Yoga; Living Arts’ star yogi Rodney Yee; Cyndi Lee of OM Yoga; Gurmukh of Golden Bridge Yoga; Alan Finger of Yogaworks; Baron Baptiste of Baptiste Power Yoga; Beryl Bender Birch of Hard and Soft Yoga; and Natasha Rizopoulos of Yogaworks.
Yoga, a physical, mental and spiritual practice believed to be thousands of years old, is popular worldwide, with hundreds of styles of teaching, each emphasizing a different aspect or goal of the practice. Yoga recently made headlines for Indonesia’s religious ban on certain yoga traditions. In addition, new practitioners of yoga are challenging the more traditional mystical forms of yoga, introducing a less structured and more humorous mode to the practice. Enlighten Up! touches on some of these controversies while introducing audiences to both familiar and little-known dimensions of the yoga world.
Presented by Balcony Releasing, Enlighten Up! is unrated with a running time of 82 minutes. Following its premiere at New York's IFC Center on April 1, the film will screen in more than 30 cities including Los Angeles (April 17), San Francisco and Berkeley (May 1), San Diego and St. Louis (May 8), Seattle and Portland (May 15), Phoenix and Santa Fe (May 22), Atlanta, Denver and Philadelphia (May 29), Washington, D.C. (June 5), and Chicago and Minneapolis (June 12).
For more information, please visit www.enlightenupthefilm.com.
Kate Churchill, Nick Rosen, and others who appear in the film are available for interviews.
Press Contacts:
Jenny Lawhorn / jennylawhorn@fatdot.net
Charlene Caronan / charlenecaronan@fatdot.net
Fat Dot
T: 212.691.4224
