American Mystic
American Folklore • 1h 21m
Alex Mar • USA• 2010 • Three young Americans have chosen the fringes of alternative religion
Chuck lives in the South Dakota badlands. While he and his wife struggle to make ends meet, they find meaning in their Lakota Sioux heritage, making great effort to preserve their rituals, such as sundancing. In Northern California, Morpheus, a pagan priestess, cultivates a spiritual sanctuary; in the former revivalist district of Upstate New York, Kublai plies his trade as a Spiritualist medium. Among the dusky landscapes of rural America, these three individuals embrace distinct ways of life outside of mainstream society, immersed in alternative faiths.
A triptych portrait of modern American fringe-dwellers, American Mystic is imbued with a lyrical, separatist spirit. Alex Mar's first documentary premiered at Tribeca, San Francisco Docfest and Albuquerque.
Up Next in American Folklore
-
Below Sea Level
Gianfranco Rosi • Italy • 2008 • A portrait of California flatland squatters
.
Roughly 200 miles southeast of Los Angeles, in the wild desert of Southern California, is an ad hoc town without electricity or running water. Some denizens are just passing through, others are here to stay. While ... -
Born to Be
Tania Cypriano • USA • 2020 • Inside the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery
New York's Mount Sinai Hospital houses the groundbreaking Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, a mecca for q...
-
Obit.
Vanessa Gould • USA • 2017 • Inside an award-winning team of obituary writers.
How to fit a life into 1,000 words? The obituary writers at the New York Times race against the clock to cull details, weaving decades of pe...
