Kickstarter

This is a story about the power of the human spirit to heal, transform and reach out to others. The film opens as a sun-drenched visual journey that spans the Indian subcontinent, paralleling the life of California based Yoga teacher Psalm Isadora and the lives of a group of women in an Indian slum - whom she teaches. Part introspective travel diary, part social documentary -the film follows the extraordinary journey of Psalm Isadora as she sets out on a service mission in India with goal of training local women to become yoga teachers in their own communities. This is a film about the transformative power of Yoga as told through the personal journeys of these women.

Yoga brings connection to life force, personal empowerment, and mental, emotional and physical well-being. Based in her personal experience, Psalm believes that Yoga is a powerful tool for healing and transformation of an individual and a community. Her students are women who work for less than a dollar a day, have little freedom and are certainly discouraged from having dreams or ideas of their own. Ironically, they are the pillars, the mothers and the breadwinners in this community. We follow the students into their villages and daily lives, while sharing in their struggles and their triumphs. Psalm teaches her students that a simple Yoga practice can help them become empowered members of their community.

As Psalm connects to her students she becomes aware of how deep in her own blood her personal suffering runs. She wonders if her desire to heal others is a means of avoiding the parts of herself that she’s deemed too painful to look at. Can personal responsibility break the seemingly cyclical patterns of our ancestral lineage? Psalm's search for answers takes us on a global spiritual journey; from her Childhood home in Northern California, to the Lakota Sundance's in South Dakota, and finally back to India to reconnect with the Indian women she has been teaching.

Upon returning to India, Psalm and her students, embark on a cross-country trip from Varanasi, through Calcutta and finally to and Ashram in South India. The women spend two weeks at Devipuram with Psalm & her Guru Sri Amritananda. There, they will deepen in the transformative practice in hopes of becoming teachers in their own communities. The film explores the challenges these women face as they continue to practice yoga in Psalm's absence. Will the practice render the women empowered members of their community? Will their communities transform through them? Together, Psalm and her students take a journey into the depths – (and) not the heights - of the human soul.

Psalm Isadora and I met about 9 years ago. We were both part of an art film collective in Los Angeles, www.lafco.tv - it was an explosive wild period in our lives. Psalm was the wild child, the beautiful free spirited young single mother. Internally, as she recounts now, her life was in Chaos, dominated with terrible mood swings, fatigue, panic, medication - you name it. Exhausted and unable to breathe, she turned to Yoga.

For years our lives meandered off in separate directions - as mine lead me across a landscape of people and cultures through the lens of many documentaries and narrative films; and Psalm's took her across a never-ending mystical landscape around the planet. She studied with Sufi mystics, she twirled with dervishes in Istanbul, and she journeyed to India where she met her teacher, Sri Amritananda. When I met up with her some eight years later - I met a woman who is fully awakened to her power as a human being. She is a re-knowned yoga teacher in the United States who is doing incredible service work aimed at empowering women and girls. This is not the same woman I knew nine years ago: Psalm is a walking testament to the power of Yoga to transform a person.

We have been filming for a year and are 5K short of our budget needs for our humble and final shoot in India and completion of principal photography. We believe that this film will raise awareness and inspire people too. We are scheduled to shoot in January of 2011. The goal of this portion of the shoot is to follow the Indian students, as they become yoga teachers in their own communities, sharing the yoga as a preventative medicine and connection to knowledge and hope;
The money we raise here will allow us to get all of our equipment and travel squared away for the shoot, while we wait for our grant funding to kick us into post-production.