There is a new documentary hitting limited theaters starting tomorrow that all Yoga lovers and skeptics should see. The film, Enlighten Up! is directed and produced by Kate Churchill.

Having seen the film, I can definitely say that the film does a fabulous job at showing the different dimensions of the yoga world. It’s a really fun film because you not only get to learn about the yoga world, but you get to watch Kate’s subject, Nick Rosen go on a journey, finding out what yoga is all about and if it will truly enlighten him and his life.

He yearns to find out if yoga is anything more than a workout. Nick investigates yoga (practiced by some 16 million Americans) for six months, talking with everyone from celebrity yogis in LA to yoga teachers from India. This is quite the road trip experiment!

I wanted to know all about it, so I interviewed filmmaker, Kate Churchill. Here is what she had to say.

Having practiced yoga for 7 years, why create a documentary now as opposed to when you were first starting out?
The initial idea for this film came from Tom and Jeanne Hagerty, the Executive Producers, who had gone on their honeymoon to Hawaii and met Norman Allen, an unusual yogi who lives in a remote part of the island. The following year, they approached me about making a film. At that point, we were all practicing at the same yoga studio, and I don’t think we had any idea what we were endeavoring to do.

What types/styles of yoga were you introduced to while filming the documentary?
We shot “Enlighten Up!” over a period of 6 months as we travelled throughout the US and India. Along the way, we met, interviewed, studied with over 70 yogis so we encountered a wide array of yoga styles. In the film, some of the styles we feature include: Ashtanga Yoga, Iyengar Yoga, Bikram Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Laughing Yoga, OM Yoga, ISHTA Yoga, Dharma Mittra Yoga among others.

Which type/style of yoga best suits you and why?
When I started this film, I was looking for the one style of yoga that would be the perfect fit for both me and for Nick. By the end of making this film, I discovered that there isn’t just one practice that suits me, but rather depending on my needs on any given day the practice will change.

Typically I practice four days a week for about 90 minutes each day—sometimes less, sometimes more. It is a practice that mixes a number of different styles and allows me to pick and choose what to focus on for that morning.

Over 16 million Americans practice yoga, but do you think that the majority of them are practicing it in hopes of enlightenment?
People practice yoga for all different reasons ranging from physical and spiritual, and that is a central theme of the film. While we were shooting, I was searching for some form of enlightenment while Nick was really questioning whether yoga could be just a great workout and perhaps give you some entry into a sense of peace. The funny thing about enlightenment is that if you never define what it is, then you can endlessly look for it and perhaps that is what many people are doing while having a great work out.

What brought the decision of Nick investigating yoga for 6 months as opposed to more or less amount of time?
It was based on logistics as well as idealism. It wasn’t a realistic option to go on an open-ended search, and yet at the start of this project I really believed that if we had six months and could go anywhere in the world we would find some truly enlightened teacher and Nick and I would be instantly transformed. That is the idealism part—or perhaps it was more naivety.

How many times have you been to India, and each time have you gone to yoga teachers?
Although I have worked all over the world, the first time I went to India was to shoot this film. I was there for about ten weeks. I really love that country and hope to go back many times. I don’t know that I would go to study yoga as much as to explore an incredible country.

What did you learn about yourself while filming this documentary?
I worked on this film for almost five years, so it seemed like my learning was endless. I had never intended to be in the film, which I ended up being and which challenged every belief I had of how I made films while also making me examine how I worked with my team.

I learned that practice is practice, and ultimately any path someone takes they have to take themselves—they can’t have someone else take it or someone else tell them how to do it and the answers they are originally seeking might not even be the ones that they need.

Was anyone that you interviewed for the documentary hesitant to be part of the project?
For the most part in the US, people were quite willing to participate with the exception of Norman Allen. It took me four trips to Hawaii to get to the point where Norman was willing to let us film him. In the 1980’s, Norman left New York City for a more reclusive and simple life living off the grid in Hawaii, so a camera crew and participating in a documentary is a significant change of pace.

In India, we weren’t able to confirm our interviews until we were there, which put us in a constant state of uncertainty. Sometimes it took a little more effort, but ultimately we were able to interview everyone that we had hoped to interview.

What do you have to say about yoga seeming like somewhat of a trend?
I haven’t properly studied indicators of the industry like yoga studios closing and opening to draw a conclusion that can be supported by factual evidence.

The Yoga Journal, considered to be the leading magazine in the industry, published market surveys in 2004 and 2008 and found very consistent results in terms of the number of people practicing yoga (16.5 million in 2004, 15.8 million in 2008) while showing an 87% increase in the dollars spent on yoga (2.95 billion in 2004, 5.7 billion in 2008).

This seems to support a growth in yoga as a product. It will be interesting to see what will happen with this current economy. Last fall, The New York Times ran a story saying that as people in Silicon Valley were losing their jobs, the yoga studios were seeing an increase in business.

Following its theatrical premiere at New York’s IFC Center on April 1, Enlighten Up! will expand nationally, including engagements in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, San Diego, Seattle, Washington DC, Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis, Santa Fe, St. Louis, and many more.