Ayurveda: Art of Being

Although filmmaker Pan Nalin is a believer in Ayurveda,there is little in the film to convince anybody else.

Writer-director Pan Nalin's film is at its best when he focuses on the meticulous, hands-on preparation of herb- and mineral-based drugs; it's also genuinely provocative to hear Ayurvedists argue that healing should be a vocation rather than a career.

A sometimes eye-opening, if overlong, German-Swiss documentary on a holistic health system that's been practiced, mostly in India, for more than 500 years.

For the most part, though, Ayurveda speaks in subtitled Asian cadences to an affluent international audience primed to believe.

As a believer preaching to an audience of believers, he (Nalin) feels no need to offer proofs or anything even approaching a rational argument.