Return to Gandhi Road is a New Zealand-made film about an extraordinary Buddhist teacher and the efforts he made to rescue texts from Tibet during the cultural revolution of the Sixties. It's one for the seekers, Simon Morris says.
Simon Morris: Return to Gandhi Road is clearly a labour of love, involving the family of a Buddhist teacher called Kangyur Rinpoche, a number of his Western followers, and at least one New Zealander, Kim Hegan.
Kim is part of the Hegan show business dynasty, and his daughter Yeshe Hegan has directed this documentary.
The story of Return to Gandhi Road is told partly by Kim, partly by the family and disciples of Rinpoche.
In fact, there are two stories - one, of Kim returning to the house in Darjeeling, India where Rinpoche established a Buddhist monastery, and the second, how and why they got there from their home in Tibet.
Kim was part of the wave of Westerners attracted to Northern India during the Sixties and early Seventies.
Often the way in was musical. Kim himself played the sitar - pretty well, to my ear. And the subsequent search for meaning and truth often led - then and now - to Buddhism.
Rinpoche's reputation preceded him - as a teacher and holy man, but also for a more tangible achievement.
When the Chinese government started to crack down on Tibet - particularly Tibetan Buddhist leaders like Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama - life became increasingly dangerous.
The family packed up and took off. And by "packed up" I mean gathered together an extraordinary collection of writings - enough to fill two trucks - and drove them through the narrow passes of the Himalayan mountains to safety.
These were the collected teachings of Buddha.
My knowledge of Buddhist texts is essentially limited, but it seems I'm not alone in this. The teachings of Buddha himself seemed to be scattered all over Tibet and beyond.
As far as I can tell, there's no one Buddhist Bible - a finite book containing all necessary texts. In fact, whenever a new collection of sayings is discovered, it's a matter for celebration.
Rinpoche and his family brought his mostly hand-written - and extraordinarily beautiful - books and scrolls to Darjeeling, where he set up his monastery in Gandhi Road.
And this is where Hegan and other Westerners sought out their new teacher.
Interestingly the followers - including Kim Hegan himself - don't fit the general impression of hippy-drippy stoners from the psychedelic Sixties.
Many of them are French academics, they're all practical, well-read and rather intellectual.
And their individual spiritual quests were by no means smooth. Hegan himself lost his faith entirely when he had a sudden epileptic fit. He came back to New Zealand and had nothing to do with Buddhism for years.
It took the death of Rinpoche to urge him to return - with his daughter and film-crew in tow - to the scene of his early awakening.
Like most spiritual journeys, Return to Gandhi Road is clearly of most importance to fellow-travellers, though many of them are entertaining company along the way.
The film is the result of years of work and some solid crowd-funding.
Rinpoche himself remains inevitably elusive - though the few film clips of him show a gentle, smiling presence. However, the love he continues to inspire is undeniable.
One for seekers, in other words. And Gandhi Road is an interesting companion piece to another recent return trip to the spiritual Sixties, Romantic Road.
