It was all supposed to be fairly simple for filmmaker and yoga enthusiast Kate Churchill.

The idea for her documentary, Enlighten Up, was to take an average yoga skeptic and put him through a six-month experiment during which they would travel the world meeting yogis and yoga practitioners, and gain an understanding and an appreciation.

Courtesy photo/Jonathon Hexner

Nick Rosen, 29, was the skeptic chosen to be front and center in Kate Churchill’s documentary Enlighten Up, an examination of yoga.

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“I think I started from a pretty naive and idealistic point. I really believed, in six months, if we could go anywhere in the world, that something dramatic and radical would happen,” Churchill said during a phone interview. “No matter who the person was, no matter how skeptical he was, it was inevitable that something would happen. I had this blind enthusiasm, in a way.”

Not everything went according to plan. Churchill’s subject was Nick Rosen, a 29-year-old journalist from New York who seemed suitable enough. But through a series of beginning yoga classes and interviews with experts, his appreciation was only mild and Churchill’s own perspective was becoming clouded.

“I liked that he was a skeptic, because I had such certainty that we were going to embark on this very life-changing trip that it was a way to kind of stack the deck,” she said. “I really liked that he was a journalist because I thought his journalistic skills would be a great collaborator for researching the subject and investigating that.”

Overall, Enlighten Up took more than five years to complete, much of that consumed by postproduction. The six-month journey itself took the pair from New York to Los Angeles, Hawaii and India.

The film includes not only footage and firsthand accounts of Rosen’s immersion into the world of yoga, but excerpts from interviews with yogis about enlightenment and the supposed transformative spiritual power of yoga.

After a while, however, Rosen isn’t buying into the powers of the downward-facing dog and Churchill isn’t happy with the vague and sometimes conflicting answers from her hand-picked experts.

“I would say yoga is a process, and for me, yoga is about becoming aware,” said Churchill, who added that Rosen moved to Colorado after filming and continues to practice yoga on occasion. “I think there’s a lot of different ways to do that. Therein lies the ambiguity in how people define it.”

Churchill wasn’t even planning on putting herself in the film at all, but in the end, her growing frustration with Nick and expectations gone awry fuel the movie’s main conflict.

“We spent nine months cutting a version of the film without me in it,” Churchill said. “The feedback was so consistent that we really had no choice but to listen. It was through that process that I really started to look at the whole trip as it happened, not as I wanted it to happen.”

It wasn’t until Churchill spent more than a year in the editing room, trimming more than 500 hours of footage into the final product, that she realized how much the film benefited from her initial expectations being thrown for a loop.

“The movie we ended up making is an incredibly honest, transparent story of our journey which includes a lot of frustration and tension, which was really fueled by me realizing that my expectations were over the top,” she said. “It became much more complicated than I ever expected.”

Enlighten Up is currently playing at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas.

TODD JORGENSON can be reached at 940-566-6871. His e-mail address is tjorgenson@dentonrc.com.