Like generalized undergraduate to specialized graduate education, the dinner reunion of a large family where each unit contributes its own dish, is April’s Short Cut to Nirvana: On Pilgrimage to the Kumbh Mela compared to six-month-later Naked in Ashes. Both are by U.S.-based Western filmmakers with interest in, and experience of, India, Nepal and Tibet, and the documentaries converge in one or another of religious festivals celebrated at one-to-twelve-to-twelve-times-twelve-year cycles at locations along the holy Ganges, four places where divine nectar (amrit) fell to earh.

The first film covers the 2001 Maha, or Great, gathering and is an overview, if such is possible, of the reputed seventy million pilgrims in attendance, as seen in ways through Occidental eyes and participation. Third of Buddhist Paula Fouce’s four documentaries arising from this fifth-generation filmaker's years in South Asia, Naked in Ashes is a more specific, limited portrait. Only a few late minutes actually concern one of such gatherings, that at Ujjain, but by far the focus is on one of the numberless participating “groups,” as the camera follows several different though connected Yogis who seek to suppress the physical, liberate the soul from cycles of rebirth, and pass on their five millennia of practice and wisdom.

A screening couple who had been married at the film’s festival and are soon to open a yoga center here, preferred this one precisely for its specificity, and admittedly it does dig deeper, but there's no inherent reason to value one portrait above the other. Surprisingly, aside from the English-speaking German Narmada Puri, who arrived a third-of-a-century back and continues a basic existence in her guru’s jungle, Fouce’s effort is exclusively masculine. It shares select moments with Short Cut -- an arm raised, or a devotee standing up, for thirteen years on end; fasts, beds of nails and out-of-body samadi (silence) trances of bliss; pulling heavy weights with the genitals, thousands of naked Saints on final Bathing Day -- but is more subdued in a color scheme of red, gold, saffron of course, and the title’s ash-grey that interrelates death and (re)birth.

Banks along Sacred Ganges are sprinkled with crematoria, and with only the skimpiest of tanga-like apparel (langota) and a cloth-bolt wrap that may be thicker against cold, these holy men smear their otherwise bare bodies with human ash. Barfani Das lives in one such burning ground half the year, with his leprosy-crippled pupil Hanuman Das, whom he either carries on his back or who scampers along like a spider.

Most others do not live there but nonetheless powder themselves similarly, such as Dhuna Giri, a Nepali whose wristwatch is the only concession to modernity among these men who speak (subtitled in English) of the inner compensation for the hardships of renunciation. One is not marked as a Yogi by wearing robes but by serving Shiva, attracting others to good and assuming their sins for alms and donations; by keeping alive the fire of Agni, imparting awareness in measured doses lest the learner go crazy and his guru (incorrectly etymologized as “darkness”-“light”) “made infamous,” and by barefoot trips to the god’s dwelling place high in the Himalaya. Decidedly not an easy life, they realize, so “in another fifty years you will hardly hear the word ‘Yogi.’”

Among grainy slow motions, and amidst this myriad of wondrous faces -- in 1996 Fouce published Shiva, a photographic record of Yogis -- the center is Shiv Raj Giri, of the Avan Achara order said to be the oldest and to predate the Christian Era by three millennia, and his disciple Santosh Giri. With parental consent, the boy from Bengal has served an initiation for three of his fourteen years. He speaks of his own joy and anticipation and is seen accompanying his teacher and others in the mountains, to villages and festivals, and on pilgrimage.

Apprenticeship served, shivering from a cleansing plunge into the sacred waters to which his shaved locks are consigned, the pupil kneels prostate and is given his kit and robe of office. The silvered trident laid aside, in front of civilian onlookers bundled against the chill, the dreadlocked master blesses the new brother. An otherworldly, dying tradition is handed down to yet another generation. 

(Released by Paradise Filmworks International; not rated by MPAA.)