The India Trip
1971 · 49m · Canada
Directed by Bill Davies
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Professor Albert Jordan spends a year with his family near Pondicherry, India, observing the ancient French outpost and Auroville, where Western devotees follow Sri Aurobindo under a 94-year-old French guru.
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Davies treats Auroville like an anthropological puzzle box, but the film genuinely wants us to *believe* in the guru's vision—it's too sincere to subvert, which is exactly why it bores me.
A masterwork of observational restraint from the NFB's documentary tradition; Davies lets the landscape and ritual speak, cutting with such formal discipline that 49 minutes feels like a complete philosophical argument about Western seekerism and cultural displacement.
The decision to let long stretches breathe without commentary—just the sound of daily life in the ashram—is what makes this work; it trusts the viewer to sit with strangeness rather than narrate it into comfort.