Two days after Denzel Washington won his Oscar, Ansa Akyea sat chained to a wooden column in a barn in Du Page County. Next to him, wearing a convincing look of misery, shivered Kim Ferguson, in a performance enhanced by the near freezing temperatures of a late March cold snap. In another movie these actors would make a handsome couple. But in this one they played Harper and Alma Morgan, abused sharecroppers kidnapped by a landowner to whom they owe an impossible debt. This villain, Henry Hemmings, and his brother Andrew scheme to hand them over to a more execrable scoundrel named Clarence to pay off their own gambling debts.
Nothing happened.
“Feel,” he said, “what you are saying.”
The director grinned.
Anchal’s success coincided with the fulfillment of a personal quest that began when he was a 20-year-old art student attending a painting camp held in a forest at a spiritual retreat. There, he says, he met an older man who during a long walk in the woods told him that in his present lifetime Anchal was missing his spiritual guide. In order to follow the path toward enlightenment, Anchal must find him. That day he became a vegetarian, began praying, and began searching for his guru. “I met so many people,” he says. “So many gurus. But I didn’t like.”
Correction creates good karma for all and advances humanity’s progress toward Satya yuga. Since Krishna showed up some 5,100 years ago, Karunakara Guru calculated, God has sent the planet 2,444 gurus to help us along the way–Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed included. In spite of their efforts, we can’t seem to get our act together. But we should arrive in Satya yuga sometime in the next 427,000 years.
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It flopped. Hindu fundamentalists, supporters of India’s Shiv Sena party, were outraged by Anchal’s portrayal of Krishna as a visionary but otherwise ordinary man–which ran contrary to the popular notion of him as a randy superbeing who could satisfy his thousands of wives. Riots erupted outside movie houses. In Trivandrum protesters burned Anchal in effigy, and nervous theater owners across India yanked the film. Though it was later broadcast on television with little uproar, Rishivamsam bankrupted Anchal, and he worried that a reputation as a strictly spiritual filmmaker might alienate the audience he’d cultivated with his early hits. So he did damage control, filming an unremarkable comedy called Pilots, which broke even.
