It was a lot of salads and it was all vegetarian," Maclain said. "Magdalena was also a huge department, because they were responsible for feeding 2,500 people every day. They had lunch in Magdalena Hall, separate from the other gigantic meeting hall, where meditation sessions were held. And a couple people told us that at the end of the month they would throw 50-75 bucks on everybody's banking card and you could drink in the beer garden that night." "They created their own banking system, with its own banking cards.
Eight-hour days, 12-hour days," Chapman said. After a chatting over a communal breakfast, they'd be sent off to their divisions of work. Most sannyasin lived in prefab A-frames, arranged in beehive formations, with four units connected by a communal space between them. But after narrowing down Wild Wild Country from 300 hours of archival footage and new interviews, there was one sequence the directors wanted to include but couldn't quite fit into the sweeping narrative of the utopian project's rise and fall: what was a day like for an average follower of Bhagwan, living and working in Rajneeshpuram? "We interviewed the decision makers because we were interested in the political battle," Maclain said. "There was a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss them."īut in talking with Bhagwan's followers-the sannyasin-the brothers found a more complicated story. "You do some light googling and the first thing that pops up is 'terrorist sex cult,'" Chapman Way, who directed Wild Wild Country with his brother Maclain, told an audience at IFC Center. Bhagwan pleaded guilty to immigration fraud and returned to India, where he died in 1990.įrom the outside, the Rajneesh movement checked off the dangerous cult criteria. Sheela was arrested and later convicted for her part in a conspiracy to poison 751 people with salmonella to suppress voter turnout ahead of a local election. Four years later, Rajneeshpuram was in chaos. With the help of his powerful personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, the Rajneeshees bought 64,000 acres just outside Antelope to construct their utopian city: Rajneeshpuram.
A mystic who defied Hindu sexual norms, and hoped to transform his followers into "the new man," he hoped to expand beyond his Pune ashram in India.
#Seven days in utopia netflix series#
The new Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country opens in Antelope, Ore., a town of 40 people who, in 1981, had no idea Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was headed their way.
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