Hot Docs 2009

Yoga has become the West's workout of choice and with studios popping up at a Starbucks rate, there's no surprise that this spiritual sport is now a multimillion dollar industry. But chakra panties, copyrighted yoga poses and a push to include yoga in the Olympics? Surely this all flies in the face of a sacred practice that's rooted in the teachings of renunciation and the search for self-knowledge and personal freedom. Filmmaker John Philps considers the misappropriations of a tradition-cum-trend by consulting with yoga competition winners, studio owners, purist practitioners and anti-yoga entrepreneurs. To further inform his musings, he attempts to track down guru Bikram Choudhary, "the bad boy of yoga" famous for his "hot" style of yoga and infamous for suing yogi instructors who teach his trademarked postures without permission. Yoga, Inc., which promises to fascinate yoga enthusiasts and cynics alike, is an entertaining, insightful and topical anthropological examination of what happens when karma and capitalism collide. Presented with LIQUIDMAN.