Talk about going out on a limb. Kate Clere McIntyre mortgaged her house to make a film about yoga. Shane Gilchrist discusses empowerment and exercise with the New Zealand director.
Two decades ago, Kate Clere McIntyre took up yoga while studying at the University of Otago. Back then, her teacher wore black leotards and the class was quiet, serious and small.
Fast forward: the New Zealand-born, Sydney-based director has documented yoga's move from the margins into the mainstream in Yogawoman, a film that captures not only a proliferation of challenging poses but a burgeoning passion for a pursuit in which the benefits stretch beyond the mere physical.
As its title suggests, Yogawoman looks at the discipline from a female perspective. Originally taught and practised primarily by men, yoga is now led by a new generation of teachers, who have adapted it for a woman's body and needs.
Filmed in nine countries and featuring 50 yoga experts, the film describes yoga as a transformative, empowering experience for many women, who reveal how it has helped them deal with conditions such as breast cancer, infertility, anxiety and depression, given them strength to recover from abuse and eating disorders as well as helped them through pregnancy, motherhood and menopause.
"It was a very different era back when I started," McIntyre recalled from her Sydney home last week before she packed her bags for a series of screenings in New Zealand's main centres, including at Dunedin's Rialto Cinema on Thursday, April 19.
"Not many people did it and it was very serious. These days, there are people playing music and so many different sorts of people coming. It is so much more in the mainstream," she says, pointing to an estimated 17 million women in North America who now practise yoga.
Yoga is now a multimillion-dollar industry, the images of bearded Indian men in robes obscured by big-city billboards offering a more modern take on a discipline that began more than 5000 years ago. In fact, all those billboards (and similar television advertisements) prompted McIntyre to embark on the project in 2009.
McIntyre, who produced, wrote and directed the film along with husband Michael and sister Saraswati Clere, says that while there was no small element of financial risk ("We mortgaged the house ..."), their efforts are starting to generate interest.
The recruitment of award-winning American actress Annette Bening as narrator has been an obvious bonus, too, McIntyre concedes.
"It was a fantastic coup. One of the women we interviewed was her yoga teacher and we got on to her. She donated her time to the film. She's had four kids, was married to Warren Beatty for 20-odd years, has done the whole Hollywood thing ... she was a delight to work with."
Given the popularity of yoga in the United States and Australia, release deals have been secured there as well as in Italy, Japan and elsewhere.
"It's such a big job. You get your film to its first festival and you feel like sitting down and having a glass of Champagne or something, but you've actually got heaps of work to do. It has already been to about 10 festivals and has won three awards so far. It's doing well. It's nice to be involved in a film that people like.
"I think for most audiences, it is so touching to see 50 women talking so intimately about their lives. Whether you are into yoga or not, just to hear such a social commentary ... it was a surprise how far-reaching the film would go into women's lives," McIntyre says.
Yogawoman crosses cultures, continents and economic strata; McIntyre and her crew range from New York to Uganda, Italy and India (the home of yoga), from a cancer therapy group to a correctional facility.
"Making this film, we met girls, mothers, grandmothers, CEOs, prison inmates, dying women, women living in dire poverty, and each one had found a way to make yoga work for them," says McIntyre, who emphasises that there are many differing forms of yoga.
"We don't go into all the different types in the film. It seems that they all have the same purpose. I do think there is a type for everybody.
"Often when you talk about yoga, people think you mean being flexible, but it is also about what happens to your mind. I'm the classic example of someone who is texting at the door, racing down the road trying to find a park - a multitasking, busy mother - and I just come out after yoga feeling so ... relieved.
"I go to a class in Bondi and people are dropping in from work; there are all sorts of modern girls. Everyone comes for different reasons but everyone leaves with a sense of 'upliftment'.
"The thing I like is that it can be done in the midst of your daily life. You don't have to go off to some retreat; you don't even have to have much money to do it.
"There is so much stress in people's lives, so it's good to have a tool to deal with that.
"I think it's becoming mainstream because people need it. I think we are desperate to steel our minds and not worry about the pressure we are under every day."
Or, as another woman says in McIntyre's film, yoga offers "a way to cut through our drama".
See it
Yogawoman screens at Rialto Cinema, Dunedin, on Thursday, April 19, at 6pm. A question and answer session with Kate Clere McIntyre will follow the screening.
Freebies
The Otago Daily Times has two DVD copies of Yogawoman to give away. To go in the draw, email your name, address and daytime phone number to playtime@odt.co.nz
