How to make a yoga documentary that will satisfy devotees but also entice those who balk at getting down with “downward dog”? Kate Churchill, a yoga practitioner, decided on an unusual strategy to widen her audience: she’d make the protagonist of her film a yoga skeptic. She and Nick Rosen, a 29-year-old New York journalist, traveled the globe, from the US mainland to Hawaii to India, meeting with the master teachers of yoga and having Rosen partake in yoga exercises. Some of the teachers are funny and sneakily wise, like Zen monks; some seem like spaced-out chicken thieves. But what elevates the movie is the refusal of Rosen — a grounded, non-believing pragmatist — to make the conversion to yoga spirituality and bliss that Churchill so wants for him, and for the arc of her documentary. His growth and learning are more subtle than that, and more human and profound. 90 minutes | MFA: September 12-14
