Reviewed by Steven Kiernan
Featuring Regina Lund, Siddharta, Peter, Marit, Nick,
Mervi, Ljus | Produced by Robert Cannan & Corinna Villari-McFarlane
UK cert 15 | UK RRP £15.99 | Runtime 102 minutes | Directed by Robert Cannan & Corinna Villari-McFarlane
Hold onto your chakras, because here’s a documentary to blow – or rather expand – your mind. Molkom is a town in central Sweden; a few miles north you’ll find Angsbacka, home of the annual No Mind festival. The week-long event is a veritable New Age 101, with everything from group meditation to Reiki and from finding your power animal to, yes, really, actual treehugging.
Every year, devout New Agers heads to Angsbacka for a week of workshops and events to – according to its website – “experience the joy, creativity, playfulness and love, which is here and in each now.” Here, filmmakers Villari-McFarlane and Cannan take a contemporary ‘observational documentary’ eye to seven festival-goers. The average No Mind visitor is so wacky, wonderful and downright weird, the cast could easily have ended up populated solely with borderline loonies. And many of them are. But countering this, the film-makers have struck gold with Nick, a young Australian larrikin who starts out thinking he’s going to some Scandinavian Glastonbury to pull hippy chicks but soon believes he has wound up in a cult.
Nick is the audience’s anchor to reality. More than just grounded, he’s a salt-of-the-earth cynic. Along with Nick, the lens falls largely on Siddharta, a Swedish Viking and No Mind regular who radiates a patronising holier-than-thou hippy piety. Even more New Age cliché is Ljus – a vacant-eyed and golden-haired waif spouting nonsensical hippy-isms. The film’s emotional centre comes courtesy of Mervi, a Finnish grandmother with a heartbreaking life story whose No Mind experience is framed with a tragic sense of last-gasp desperation. But it’s Nick who steals the show. From condescending outsider, he undergoes the film’s most fulfilling evolution and provides a narrative arc. It’s hard to know whether the film would work without his broad accent and cutting remarks – “I don’t believe any of this mumbo-jumbo”; “If this is a cult, where’s the sex?” He comes across like a younger version of another recent Australian documentary star, 2006’s fabulous Kenny.
While there’s a strong undercurrent of piss-taking, the film-makers are relatively sensitive to their subjects. And sure, the low budget shows, with rough-and-ready editing and hit-and-miss cinematography. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing – it puts the audience right there with a no-frills crew carting handy cams around a field in rural Sweden. Three Miles might not set the world on fire like some of its ob doc peers – it could be just too left field for a mainstream audience. But it’s also warm, fun and consistently laugh-out-loud funny. Anyone who’s ever tried to meditate, chanted an Ohm, lit a stick of sandalwood incense or doused themselves in petuli oil should be tickled and touched by this quirky little film.
EXTRAS *** There's four terrific featurettes: Angsbacka – Meet the Commune, a look at the people who created and run the No Mind festival; The Blagger’s Guide to New Age; The No Mind Festival – what’s it all about?; and An Angsbacka Virgin – First Impressions of the No Mind Festival. Plus there's the theatrical trailer.