WILD YOGI

Wild Yogi is a visual ode that presents the life of young Tikaram Yogi, as he journeys through the heart of Nepal in search of the divine.

Tikaram’s metamorphosis into a wild yogi can be seen in his relentless pursuit to return to a natural life. Tikaram sleeps outside on a mountaintop, eats primarily fruit, and practices yoga for several hours a day. Through years of meditation and intensive self exploration, Tikaram has found within himself an endless ocean of gratitude and devotion for the world around him. The predominant theme of the documentary is observation transforming into realization. Realization, according to Tikaram, is remembering the inherent connection all of us share to the divine source, Mother Earth. The film explores the notion of spiritual expansion through the subjective point of view of one man, an intimate documentation that brings incredible insight into the global need for health and oneness.

The film is abstract in its form, a meandering observation of disparate lives, threaded together by an ephemeral connection with the Wild Yogi. The documentary serves as Tikaram's eyes, viewing the faces of children studying at his old grade school, a tantric practitioner healing a sick child, and bodies waiting to be incinerated on sandalwood pyres. The audience is taken on a journey of spirit through space and time, untethered to any moment for too long, continuously shifting from character to space. From the intensity of urban chaos to a sublime stillness in the Himalayas.

The sporadic, emotive nature of the film reveals Tikaram’s encounters through the lens of his outer and inner spiritual transformation.

Nepal's rich culture and enduring spiritual practices, as captured in the film, will open the hearts and minds of an audience to a world they would otherwise not have access to. The audience will see tantric practices and ritual sacrifice entirely unique to rural Nepal. A tantric adorning bones and brass bells, shaking, chanting, and beating an animal hide drum from sunset until sunrise. A ceremony culminating in the sacrifice of a chicken, an ancient practice used to heal the sick. Additionally the film will exhibit a Nepalese dance ceremony in a rural mountain village involving song and dance by firelight. While filming in remote areas of Nepal, we were told that the local practices, like their traditional dance, had never been captured on a cinema camera or shared outside of that region. Wild Yogi offers a rare view of cultural traditions that have never been seen by the outside world. Observing a raw humanity unique to documentary filmmaking, Wild Yogi forms a divine thread between its audience and the characters we discover.

Wild Yogi observes Nepal’s shifting collective identity and spirit, from the urban sprawl of Kathmandu to the rural mountains of Pyuthan. The first stage of production took place in the summer of 2025 between June and August only months before Nepal’s recent political collapse and overthrow of the Prime Minister. The documentary film observes the growing spark of a revolution, a time capsule into a summer of growing tensions and societal unrest.

Project Website: https://daviswbrownell.wixsite.com/wildyogi

Director, co-editor, cinematographer | Davis Brownell

Producer | Jethro Waters

Producer | Blaine Brownell

Co-editor | Emile Rizzo-Banks