I loved watching this film; it gives you the sense that even among the poorest most squalid conditions we can find love. My heart soared watching love beam from Amma's face as she embraced thousands. The Christians say that heaven will be an eternity basking in God's love and I dismissed that idea until I saw this holy woman. I loved the scene where a man is on top of an elephant submerged in a river and he gently prods the roaring beast to the shore. "We have to fight our devils, greed arrogance and selfishness." This film transcends the description "movie." It's more of a "concentrated prayer." Prayer doesn't have a plot, but it peels away the resistance of the mind to the divine, like this film does. I saw the critics call it fawning, unenlightening, one sided, but prayer IS one sided, the side is love. If you're praying you don't think of negative things, you just bask.

I suppose for devotees this is an orgy of staring at a beloved spiritual guide. However, for those of us who are not, there is precious little to maintain interest. I had hoped, at least, for a glimpse of another culture but what I got a very long snapshot of a cult. Thin soup and little depth. I suppose the music may be least offensive to the non-follower, but even that becomes so repetitive that in the end it is useless.Perhaps I am taking the wrong view of this. During my university experience in the 70s conceptual art took the stage. I remember seeing a film of a person crushing a cockroach to a brown smear on their naked abdomen. This received high praise for its lack of directedness or something. So this film may rank highly as a tribute to those old art pieces from thirty years ago.

This is the story of Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, an Indian mystic who teaches about love and peace and helps the poor and downtrodden. Well not so so much a story but a meditation on her and her work. It is filled with some of the most beautiful photography I have seen in a long time and nicely brings us to a particular place that is alien to most of the world. The film is also painfully dull and boring.Call me unbeliever or a person with no attention span but this film had me nodding off ten minutes in. I learned nothing I didn't already know from brief TV exposes on the same woman. What am I suppose to get out of this film? That she is a nice person healing the sick and giving hope to the broken? I knew that going in. I wanted a sense of her as a human being (or since some say she is not human a reason to believe otherwise) , instead I got nice scenery and people gushing about this wonderful person who made a deep difference in their lives. Thats nice but how is that going to help me? I don't have a clue. Nothing in this film made me feel anything other than if I wanted a nap I could have saved the admission price and stayed home.Don't get me wrong I do like films that are essentially meditations, Werner Herzog's Wheel of Time springs to mind, but where Herzog engaged your spirit he also engaged your mind and made you think as well as feel. That never happened here.If you want to see some beautiful scenes of India see this movie. If you want to be enlightened spiritually or otherwise look elsewhere.

The only thing touching and deeply moving about the film is Ama. For the rest it lacks in vision, poorly executed filming. At time it drags and often we wonder why did french director leave his extremely violent and meaningless fiction films and headed for India. Its not even soul-searching story. What is he trying to say? Why promote someone who does not believe in promotion. Approach to the character and its surrounding is bit artificial. The film does not have any real point of view. Its real pity because faith could have been a wonderful subject to explore. Maybe Pan Nalin or Kim Ki Duk would have done the justice to the subject. Why create a middleman and non-human element like film to know Ama, when she herself believes in human contact. I would advise to save your 8 Euros...