OVERVIEW

Inspired by real events, our film is about Helena Blavatsky, a fearless Russian mystic who arrives in New York in the midst of the Gilded Age, with nothing but her psychic gifts, unexplained sorrow and a propensity to cross dress. She is on a mission from her teachers, but what that mission is she has yet to discover. In New York she meets her soulmate, Henry Olcott. Together they investigate mediums and ghostly apparitions, and wind up launching their own spiritual movement that influenced people from Gandhi and Sherlock Holmes
to Elvis Presley and The Beatles.

FILM SYNOPSIS

Lawyer/Journalist Henry Olcott yearns to connect with his dead child and hero Abraham Lincoln whose killer he had hoped to prosecute. He hopes spiritualism will allow him to connect with them beyond the grave. Helena Blavatsky believes that the dead don’t often revisit the living. “They have better things to do.” She is on a mission to understand consciousness, life on earth and beyond. Henry is immediately beguiled. Sensing that she has special powers, he is determined to make her famous, and sets her up in a New York apartment full of exotic artifacts. Together, he claims, they will do great things.

Helena and Henry investigate The Eddys, a family of mediums in Vermont. The most famous is William, who claims to make dead relatives appear in ghostly emanations. Helena feels a strange attraction to William but soon discovers that a pseudo-scientist, Dr. George Beard, plans to use high voltage electric jolts to electrocute him and prove that his “spirit" visitors are produced by cheap theatrical tricks.

Beard's sidekick electrocutes himself instead, while Helena guides the traumatized William to another realm where they discover that they share a past life. This new self-knowledge brings serenity to William, and leads Helena to a fuller understanding of karma and reincarnation.

Henry realizes that he has much to learn to be Helena's equal. He decides to go to India and study with the spiritual masters. “Come with me,” he pleads. Helena, torn by her desire to return to India and her teachers’ admonitions to stay in the U.S., makes a snap decision: disguised as Henry's man servant, she joins Henry on the ship to India. There they found what will turn into a world famous movement: Theosophy. But that's another story...

THEIR LEGACY: An esoteric spiritual movement, dedicated to universal brotherhood and freedom of thought, embraced by the likes of William Butler Yeats, Gurdjieff, Thomas Edison, Wassily Kandinsky, Annie Besant, T.S. Eliot, Krishnamurti, Jane Goodall and many other luminaries — the Theosophical Society.