Receive Weekly Email and Text Message Updates:
Sign up for latest info on concerts, dining, promotions and more!
Go!

Most Popular

National Features >

  • Village Voice

    The Great Walls of Chinatown

    With the exception of the electric rice cookers, this Bowery tenement could have come straight from the Nineteenth Century.

    By Elizabeth Dwoskin

  • Houston Press

    Getting Off

    DUI attorney Tyler Flood wins 80 percent of his trials--even if his clients were 100 percent drunk.

    By Mike Giglio

  • Miami New Times

    Park or Die Tryin'

    From the homeless parking mafia to the meter fairy, finding a spot in Miami has taken a turn toward the surreal.

    By Gus Garcia-Roberts

  • City Pages

    The Baddest Men on the Planet

    Straight from the Sam's Club tire shop, Brett Rogers prepares to meet Fedor Emelianenko in mortal combat.

    By Bradley Campbell

Darshan, the Embrace

Showing at Northwest Film Forum, Fri., Sept. 1–Thurs., Sept. 7. Not Rated. 92 minutes.

Ben Kenigsberg

Published on August 30, 2006

This is the kind of artistic endeavor for which the word "hagiography" was invented: a documentary portrait of Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, a Hindu leader who devotes her life to spreading inspiration, providing charity, and dispensing a famed spiritual embrace. At the film's climax, she hugs 45,000 admirers within a span of 21 hours. With no structure to speak of, the film documents "Amma" at work and interviews her breathless followers, along the way cherishing at length—albeit from a wide-eyed remove—the beauty of Hindu culture. Without explanatory narration, the impressionistic editing is likely to prove tedious for the uninitiated. Werner Herzog's Wheel of Time was, in a sense, the Buddhist equivalent of this film, as well as a more illuminating look at the power and transience of ritual. BEN KENIGSBERG