Admission $4.00

The first film to be made in Sanskrit, this is a tribute to the ideas and teachings of Shankara, who lived over a thousand years ago and today numbers among the world's most revered saint-philosophers. A seven-year-long project by veteran director G. V. Iyer (India's "barefoot director," and a pillar of Kannada cinema), the film follows the philosopher's life from adolescence, when he first became a mendicant, through his travels and teachings across the sub-continent, to his renunciation of the world at age 32. Shankara's commentaries and teachings expertly brought together then-fraying strands of Hinduism. Later Brahmin texts embellished his biography with miracles, but Iyer's interpretation rejects these in favor of a narrative which closely follows the Vedic texts themselves, with symbols from these texts woven in, shot on the actual idyllic locations where Shankara lived and traveled, and incorporating Vedic hymns into the soundtrack. The result is a film of charming lyricism that illuminates the life of one of India's great sons.