Tribeca Film Festival 2010 Preview: Alex Mar’s American Mystic

For tonight’s Tribeca Film Festival Preview, we’re showing you a trailer for a film that Rudie has actually already seen, and discussed on our most recent episode. For Episode 30, we discussed “rites of passage”   for our “variations on a theme,” when featuring Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout. For his film choice, Rudie discussed Alex Mar’s film, premiering this month at Tribeca: American Mystic.

In Alex Mar’s American Mystic, we follow the spiritual lives and growth of three Native American people, showcasing various rituals and beliefs. From the looks of the trailer, it is treading on somewhat controversial territory, while holding on to it’s subjects and presenting them honestly. American Mystic will be screening on April 22nd, 23rd, 25th, and 30th. For a complete list of screenings and venues, visit the official Tribeca page for the film. You can become a fan of the film on Facebook, or visit their homepage to learn more.

Set against a vivid backdrop of bucolic rural landscapes, American Mystic weaves together the stories of three young Americans exploring alternative religion. Chuck is a Native American sundancer and new father striving to balance his religious practice and family responsibilities in the South Dakota badlands; Morpheus is a pagan priestess who finds spirituality in the earthy terrain of California mining country; and Kublai explores Spiritualism in upstate New York, a modern incarnation of the area’s storied history of religious revivalism.

Alex Mar’s meditative documentary artfully sews together its subjects’ introspections with the landscapes of their quintessentially American districts. Their reflections are intercut with their work on the farm, drives along deserted highway, and hikes through mountain vistas. Gently applying these tropes of Americana to her story of fringe communities, Mar crafts a poetic tapestry of religious plurality, serving as a complement to prevalent depictions of religious America as homogenous and Christian. Chuck, Morpheus, and Kublai pursue religious insight in disparate, exceptional ways, but are united in a uniquely American vision of transcendence.

–Cara Cusumano