By Cate Montana

Anyone who saw Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time is unlikely to forget the riveting image of a handsome modern playwright sitting in a Victorian bedroom, hypnotizing himself with sufficient passion to open a portal in time and travel back to the previous century to be with the beautiful stage actress he loves.

Released in 1980, Somewhere in Time reduced audiences to tears as they were gripped by a story of love gained and love lost and the miracle of love’s ability to move mountains. That the movie also pointed out the mutability of time and the potential ability of a focused mind to change reality sufficiently to travel through time, was a by-product of the story, not the main message.

“I see spiritual cinema as a return to a shamanic type of story telling that's like shamans sitting around a campfire, passing down the [heart] of a culture from one generation to another, says Stephen Simon, director of Somewhere in Time. “That's storytelling. It has nothing to do with movie stars. It has nothing to do with mainstream. It has nothing to do anything other than telling stories.”

Blockbusters may come and blockbusters will go. But meaningful stories that speak to human experience, from Citizen Cane to Forrest Gump, are the foundation of film. Today, a rapid expansion in what is meant by human experience is revealing itself through a barrage of films fearlessly addressing themes of mind and reality (A Beautiful Mind, Sliding Doors), and topics like psychic phenomenon (Powder). Stories are being told from a wider perspective and are prompting us to perceive ourselves more expansively. The door is open, in essence, for films of transformation.

A personally affecting, transformational story was at the root of producer Mark Amin’s recent production of Dan Millman’s Way of the Peaceful Warrior. While attending a retreat at Esalen Institute in California in 1996, Amin’s assigned roommate had a copy of the book which Amin picked up. He became so absorbed in the story of a young man’s spiritual evolution via the teachings of a stranger called Socrates, that the guy left him the book after the retreat was over. The fact that it took ten years to finally bring the book into production says everything about the power of a good story. Like love, it just gets in there and won’t let you go.

Not surprisingly Amin, who has produced such movies as Frida and Nellie Bly, is a producer who comes at his projects story-first. “My personal philosophy is that audiences don't like to be lectured to,” says Amin. “They want to come and be entertained and have a story told. And then if you can do that, when they walk away they've gotten the message in the process.”

As in any creative process, there’s not just one way of coming at moviemaking. Take Indigo, for example. The movie was based upon realizations James Twyman had in 2001 when he met four psychic children in Bulgaria who were being trained at a secluded monastery. During his meetings with the children in 2001, they said they wanted to ask the adults of the world: “How would you act, and what would you do if you knew that you are an Emissary of Love right now?”

This became the core question that drove the storyline for Indigo, which documents the impact that a psychic and sensitive child named Grace has on her bitter, withdrawn grandfather, Ray. Twyman, who was scriptwriter and executive producer for Indigo, is unabashedly direct when he says he wrote and produced the movie to give his message of peace and love a more powerful vehicle to get out to the world.

“The reason why I have turned much more towards film than books in recent years is because I feel this is an important and critical message for this time, and we’re going to get to a lot more people through film than books,” says Twyman. “I’ve been having the sense that the same people are reading the same books over and over. There are millions and millions of people out there who will never read one of these books, but who may see one of these films.

“When we made Indigo, when we did the opening last year, it really was only to get enough attention to get the film into all the Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos, all the chains. At that time we knew that much more of a mainstream audience would begin watching the film. So that’s really been the goal: to get these films in front of the people who would not normally be exposed to this message.”

The same intent to reach a wider audience with important information was one of the driving reasons behind the mainstream theater release of What the Bleep Do We Know!?

“One of the things we wanted to do was to make a theatrical splash,” says co-producer Betsy Chasse. “One of the things we said was, ‘We want to bring this information in these types of films out of the fringe and into mainstream.’ So we really pushed for that.”

And the world responds

Although movies with spiritual messages have been produced occasionally, only now with visible worldwide box office response, is Spiritual Cinema being recognized as a genre. The success of movies like BLEEP!? has awakened the industry to the existence of a market that had hitherto gone unrecognized. Filmmakers like Amin, who have simply focused on telling stories that personally resonate with them, are pleased to see audiences moving in lockstep with their own vision.

“I was doing my work and wrapped up in my profession, so I never thought of focusing on that [spiritual cinema] area,” says Amin. “I was just doing my own thing. But what Peaceful Warrior has done is, it’s like somebody pulled back the curtain and suddenly you see that there are millions of people who have a common interest and they share a lot of the same philosophy with you.”

John Raatz, founder of Visioneering, a public relations and marketing firm in Los Angeles and one of the people who helped market What the BLEEP!?, has tailored all his marketing around spiritual and positive social change. He has also recently co-founded a film distribution company called Awakened Media.

“I was asked at one point during the marketing of What the Bleep!? by the Wall Street Journal, ‘How do you know an audience existed for this film?’