Introducing the screening, one of the two co-directors/-producers/-photographers laughed that their sole sponsor had beenVisa --“my own card.” An Italian based in New York eighteen years and now in San Francisco, Maurizio Benazzo has a spontaneous boyish enthusiasm and humor that come through in his and Nick Day’s Short Cut to Nirvana; On Pilgrimage to the Kumbh Mela.

This account of “the longest-running religious festival in human history” -- some evidence would date it back twelve thousand years, although the earliest certifiable reference is from less than a millenium-and-a-half ago -- covers the 2001 Maha Kumbh Mela [Festival], “Great” and equal to a thousand regular pilgrimages in that, timed to planetary alignment, it is held every hundred-forty-four years, with related celebrations at one-to-twelve year intervals. Thirty to forty million participants were anticipated, with some reports announcing actual attendance at seventy million, at the Allāhābād confluence of the Sacred Ganges and Yamuna (and mythical Saraswati) Rivers, for spiritually cleansing ablution at one of four places where amrit (heavenly nectar) fell to earth from a kumbha (pot) as devas (angel-demigods) fled with it.

Between opening and closing satellite zoom-outs of the precise spot and interspersed with the film’s only occasional artsy artificial shots, of sun-shimmering life-giving waters, the filmmakers set out to capture the rich variety of the inconceivable multitude -- Times Square as the ball drops, multiplied fifty-fold -- and the spiritual meaning of it all.

That they do not entirely succeed on either count is not to detract from their achievement. Like mountains in family snapshots, the numbers are beyond celluloid and comprehension and can only be suggested through selection; and, while talked about, spirituality is inner and unphotographable, for, as a female sadhu asserts, only a fifth of those with outward trappings of robes are truly swamis.

The game plan had been to present the event, “escaped [from] the notice of the rest of the world,” as traditional voice-over non-fiction, “preplanned interviews,” guides, translators, subtitles and all. But participants’ fellowship and humanity -- on-screen, at least, there is almost no security force -- plus curiosity about Westerners, literally sucked the filmkakers in, as various holy man and women, and ordinary folk, took to and helped them, particularly the bubbly bespectacled young Swami Krishnanand. What results is organic, a documentary that does not feel like one, without outside talking heads, analysts, professionals and baseball-game close-ups, and with appropriate original raga-ta’al-tarana music by New York’s Bob Muller (plus an additional final piece, more Indian-rock, to which rights were purchased).

The only world celebrity is Tibet’s Dalai Lama, who talks of all religions’ common social responsibility before what seem mostly white Western press corps members. Otherwise, the speaking “cast” includes various swamis, gurus, monks, sadhus and other holy people who almost to a man-woman speak with twinkling good humor of the need to simplify, escape materialism, meditate. The one disagreement, treated as tolerantly as everything else here, is whether physical mortification is necessary or not: holding one’s right arm up for twenty years; ascending a nail-bedded throne swung over hot coals; supporting weights from a stick around which the penis is tied; being buried in sand for three days (samadi, silence).

Much of the screen time is of the swirl of humankind and its skin and costume colors, as tens of thousands of tents rise around the spiritual leaders, while people dance, play, lose and find children, cook, eat, chant, pray and prepare for the naked Procession of the Saints that inaugurates the culminating Bathing Day. In this temporary megalopolis on a river plain annually both desert and flooded lowland, there are naturally booths for everything, even surfing the Web, horoscopes, marriage brokers, and theatrical performances, and yet this serious but very human carnival is the antithesis of another pilgrim’s tempting but specious Vanity Fair.

The couple of Americans who comment are young and enthusiastic but, as an Indian who has lived abroad seventeen years says of himself, at bottom from another planet. Vanessa Ramos, to whom the film is dedicated, consciously withholds herself, as a Hispanic woman and to avoid the “lot of bombardment of your senses,” while, on the other hand, New York Public Health nurse-practitioner Dyan Summers adopts yellow saris and becomes Krishnanand’s semi-girlfriend as she and he learn each other’s culture.

Such an enormous, enormously varied, picture must prove beyond the scope of an eighty-five-minute film, or an eighty-five-year lifetime. Benazzo and Day can only scratch a monumental, perhaps impossible, surface, but their effort is a worthy introduction to what is more than a single life’s task. 

(Released by Mela Films LLC; not rated by MPAA.)