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THE TIME OF THE SAGES - A feature Documentary

Help us to spread the India's jewel of wisdom through the insights of scholars and spiritual leaders

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THE TIME OF THE SAGES - A feature Documentary

THE TIME OF THE SAGES - A feature Documentary

THE TIME OF THE SAGES - A feature Documentary

THE TIME OF THE SAGES - A feature Documentary

THE TIME OF THE SAGES - A feature Documentary

Help us to spread the India's jewel of wisdom through the insights of scholars and spiritual leaders

Help us to spread the India's jewel of wisdom through the insights of scholars and spiritual leaders

Help us to spread the India's jewel of wisdom through the insights of scholars and spiritual leaders

Help us to spread the India's jewel of wisdom through the insights of scholars and spiritual leaders

Kenneth Valpey
Kenneth Valpey
Kenneth Valpey
Kenneth Valpey
1 Campaign |
Oxford, United Kingdom
$10,479 USD 60 backers
44% of $23,750 Flexible Goal Flexible Goal
Overview
I am a research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Since more than 40 years I study, teach, and research on the Bhagavata Purana, the crown jewel of India’s wisdom literature. I would like to make a documentary on this great literature to make it more widely known in the West. The Bhagavata Purana invites us to participate in a nontemporal, ever-expanding reality. It’s an engaging nourishment for the soul. I hope we'll treasure with others through this film. Dr Kenneth Valpey

SYNOPSIS

THE TIME OF THE SAGES- Bhagavata Purana

India’s Jewel of Wisdom,

A feature documentary

Having been bitten by a serpent, King Pariksit knows seven days later he will meet his death. To prepare for the impending moment, he sits down on the Ganges River bank and inquires of all the great sages: “I am going to die. Now what is my duty?” None can give him satisfactory advice. But just then the sixteen-year-old sage Sukha arrives, bearing within himself the wisdom of Veda.

Sukha narrates to King Pariksit the Bhagavata Purana, the essence of Veda. India’s sacred literature. Submissively hearing this narration throughout seven days and nights, the king attains the full pleasure of his heart's desire. At the end of the seventh day, he achieves full self-realization and thus becomes fearless.

“The Time of the Sages” film brings together the insights of prominent scholars, researchers and spiritual leaders who have dedicated themselves to the study and culture of this sacred text which is dated no later than the first half of the sixth century.

The film explores the topics of the self, existence, creation, liberation from material existence, devotion, and the cultivation of a personal relationship with the divine through the Bhagavata Purana’s rich tales.

The interviews are set in the colorful lands of Chennai and Europe and the actual locations in rural India where the events described in  Bhagavata Purana are believed to have taken place.

WHY MAKING THIS DOCUMENTARY?

The Oxford Center for Hindu Studies is host to the Bhagavata Purana Research Project. As key step in this project, we have organized an international conference in Chennai, in early 2017, with some 30 specialists from around the world presenting papers and discussing different aspects of the Bhagavata Purana. This is a perfect opportunity for us to interview and film these scholars for this documentary film.

We are living in a world full of anxiety, fear and uncertainty. Bhagavata Purana can act as an antidote for these diseases of the heart. It offers a broader vision which can change ourselves individually and collectively by showing ways of seeing and living based in our fundamentally joyful nature.

    

 

WHO IS DR KENNETH VALPEY?

Kenneth Valpey completed his B. A. in Religious Studies (University of California, Santa Barbara),  an M.A. in the Study of Religion (Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley), an M.St. (Master of Studies) in the Study of Religion (University of Oxford, U.K.), and a D. Phil. (Ph.D., University of Oxford, U.K.), finishing studies in 2003. Having taught at the University of Florida and Chinese University of Hong Kong, he is now a Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. He also acts as the dean of studies at Bhaktivedanta College in Radhadesh, Belgium, where he has been teaching since 2002. He has co-published (with Prof. Ravi M. Gupta) two volumes on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa: Sacred Text and Living Tradition (2013), and The Bhāgavata Purāṇa: Selected Readings (2016), both published by Columbia University Press.

 

WHY GET INVOLVED?

Good film needs good funding, We can’t do it without your help but here’s some other good reasons. 10% of your donations will go to the education of two young brothers in India Vrindavan,  Anurag Saraswati (11) and Siva Saraswati (6) who are living below poverty level and we are their only hope to get a decent education.

Help us raise awareness about this Asian Literature that belongs to the Western Canon and get your name in the film credits. Although if we haven’t reach our goal we will keep on shooting with your donations and continue to look for sponsors.

 

FILM THEME

The Time of The Sages is a documentary and it’s first priority is to make the viewers think and ask questions. Could there be a higher reality? What is Asian Philosophy? Who are the avatars? Who am I? What is the purpose of life?

HIGHER REALITY:


INTERVIEWEES

(in alphabetical order)

Dr Ravi M. Gupta, Vaishnava scholar. He holds the Charles Redd Chair of Religious Studies and serves as Director of the Religious Studies Program at Utah State University. He is the author of The Caitanya Vaiṣṇava Vedānta of Jīva Gosvāmī (Routledge, 2007), co-editor of The Bhāgavata Purāṇa: Sacred Text and Living Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2013), editor of Caitanya Vaiṣṇava Philosophy: Tradition Reason and Devotion (Ashgate Publishing, 2014), and co-author of The Bhāgavata Purāṇa: Selected Readings (Columbia University Press, 2016). Ravi completed his doctorate in Hindu Studies at Oxford University. He is a Permanent Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and past president the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. He is also a member of the faculty at Bhaktivedanta College.

 

Hanumatpresaka Swami is a Gaudiya Vaishnava guru and a spiritual leader for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). He is known as a Vaishnava scholar, continuously traveling, lecturing on classical Indian literature and philosophy. He is the founder and General Secretary of NIOS, the North American Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies and Visiting Professor with IECOO, the Institute for Oriental and Occidental Classical Studies, Ricardo Palma University, Lima, Peru. He is also a member of the faculty at Bhaktivedanta College where he teaches on the subject of the text Bhaktirasamrita-sindhu.

 

Dr John Stratton Hawley, Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. Ph.D.,Harvard University. He has written or edited sixteen books; three more are forthcoming.  These largely concern Hinduism and the bhakti traditions of north India.

Jack Hawley has served as director of Columbia University’s South Asia Institute and has received multiple awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian, and the American Institute of Indian Studies.  He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

Dr Barbara Holdrege, Professor of Religious Studies. Department of Religious Studies University of California, Santa Barbara. Ph.D.,Harvard University. She is a comparative historian of religions specializing in South Asian and Jewish traditions. Her research and teaching interests focus on historical and textual studies of Jewish and Hindu traditions and also engage broader theoretical issues arising out of critical interrogation of analytical categories such as the body, space, scripture, and ritual. Her publications include Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture (1996); Bhakti and Embodiment: Fashioning Divine Bodies and Devotional Bodies in Krsna Bhakti (expected 2012); and two edited volumes, Ritual and Power (1990) and Refiguring the Body: Embodiment in South Asian Religions (expected 2012).

 

Dr Nanditha Krishna, A historian, environmentalist and writer based in Chennai, Nanditha Krishna has a Ph. D. in Ancient Indian Culture from Bombay University, where she was also a Heras scholar. She is a Professor and a Research Guide for the Ph. D. programme of the University of Madras. She was the Honorary Director from 1981 of The C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation. She is the Founder-Director of its constituents: C.P. Art Centre; C.P.R. Institute of Indological Research; Saraswathi Kendra Learning Centre for Children; The Grove School (Chennai); Shakunthala Jagannathan Museum of Folk Art and Rangammal Vidyalaya (in Kanchipuram); Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar Memorial Nursery & Primary School, Kumbakonam; and C.P.R. Environmental Education Centre (a Centre of Excellence of the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Govt. of India).

 

Acharya Shrivatsa Goswami, Member of an eminent family of scholars and philosophers at Sri Radharamana Temple, Vrindavan.  Presently, Acharya Shrivatsa Goswami is the Director of Sri Caitanya Prema Samsthana, an Institute of Vaisnava philosophy and culture at Vrindavan. His commitments include directing the multi-disciplinary multi-scholar Research Project on Vraja, in collaboration with the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.   He has participated in conferences on philosophy, religion and ecology and lectured in major universities around the world.  His writings on Vaisnavism, Sri Krishna and others have been published worldwide.

Dr Graham M. Schweig is Professor of Religion and former inaugural Director of the Asian Studies program at Christophert Newport University. He is a regularly invited lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC., and was Lecturer at Duke University and later Visiting Associate Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Virginia. He  earned his doctorate in Comparative Religion from Harvard University and has contributed articles to numerous journals and books in the field. His book, Dance of Divine Love: India's Classic Sacred Love Story: The Rasa Lila of  Krishna (Princeton University Press, 2005) presents an introduction to, comprehensive treatment and translation of the Bhagavata Purana's five chapters on the Rasa Dance of Krishna with the cowherd maidens of Vraja.

Dr McComas Taylor. He has led the South Asia Progam in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University in Canberra. His research lies at the intersection of contemporary critical theory and classical Sanskrit narrative literature. His primary focus is on the construction of ‘true’ discourse in the Foucauldian sense in the Sanskritic, Hindu episteme. His initial work in this area was on the narrative fables in the Pañcatantra cycle. The primary output of this was a book, The fall of the Indigo Jackal, published by SUNY Press in 2007. Following that, he turned his attention to textual studies of the mahapuranas in which he explored various authorial strategies aimed at empowering puranic discourse. More recently, he has studied contemporary oral rendition of puranic texts, specifically the Bhagavatapurana, to explore ways in which performative and ritual practices empower discourse.

Dr Anand Venkatkrishnan B.A. Classics, Greek and Latin track 2010, Stanford University. M.A. & M.Phil South Asian Religions, Columbia University, 2012

Anand received his B.A. from Stanford in 2010 (majoring in Classics, Greek and Latin track).  He then went on to receive his M.A. and M.Phil in South Asisan Religions from Columbia University in 2012.  He received his PhD at Columbia University, and he is now
doing postdoctoral research at Oxford University. His research interests include the intersection between popular religious movements and scholarly pedagogy, the history of Sanskrit knowledge-systems, and Indian intellectual history, more broadly.

BUDGET AND CREW

“THE TIME OF THE SAGES” BUDGET

Documentary Title: The Time Of The Sages

Company: Sukha

Executive Producer/Director: Inci Milano

Executive Producer: Kenneth Valpey, Saurabh Sikka

Filmmaker
Locations: Italy, India

Shooting Schedule: 9 shoot days over 12 days in India, Chennai in seven different locations. 10 shoot days in different locations in Europe over three months.

Locations in Chennai:

-Madras University

-CP Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation

-Kapaleeswarar temple

-Sri Telisinga Perumal Temple

-Vaikhunta Perumal temple

Shooting Format: HD with Canon C300 camera packagef

Budget Date: 26/10/2016

PRE-PRODUCTION (4 months)

Research and Development


Books, ………………………………………………………………....…….…… $210

Internet and telephone bills   ………………....…………….…….…….$ 390

Donation for the short trailer’s music logo……...……………..……$ 20

Donation for the short trailer’s music Kai Engel…….....……......$100

SUB-TOTAL (PRE-PRODUCTION)…………………...........……… $720

PRODUCTION

(12 shoot days in Chennai-India, 10 days in Europe)

Crew and Personnel


Executive Producer/Director / Inci Milano………….…….Volunteer

Production Coordinators..
Inci Milano, Kenneth Valpey ..........................................................................................Volunteers

Director of Photography/
Inci Milano / Filip Cargonja………………………………………………………………..……Volunteer

Camera  Mr. Cargonja (200$ per day and partially volunteer)

........................................................................….between $600-2000

Camera Mrs. Milano……….………………………………..…….….Volunteer

Camera and operator (hired from Mumbai for 3 days)………………………………………………………………………….…….$100

Camera and operator (hired from Mumbai for 3 days)…………………………………………………………………….………...$100

Lighting (hired from Mumbai for 3 days)…..……………………………………………………..………….……..….$100

Sound Recordist/Boom Operator hired from Mumbai for 3 days)…..……………………………………………………..………………….....$100

Production Assistant for 3 days……………………………......………$ 100

Equipment Rental


3 Sony Camera pkg (camera, lenses, tripod)…Included to crew cost

Sound package (mics, boom, mixer)…………… Included to crew cost, equipments of Mr. Cargonja and Mrs. Milano

Lighting package……………………......………….…..Included to crew cost

Production Expenses


Portable hard drives for back-up storage
(5 drives 2TB, $100)…………………………………………………….....…………………….….$500

Extra Batteries…………………………………………….………….……….....$200

 

Travel Expenses


Airfare---2 person (Europe/Chennai India)……………..……………………………………………………………...…$1600

Airfare---4 person
(mumbai-chennai)……………….....…………...…$400

Indian Visa and expenses---2 person……………………..……...…….$250

Hotel Expenses India ( 3 star)---6 person( 2 crew members stay 12 nights, 4 crew members stay 4 nights……………………….…................................................…..…….$1000

Taxi Expenses off all crew and interviewees between different locations………………………………………………………….………….…....$200

Train Expenses Europe for B-Rolls Filming……..…………….……..$320

Hotel Expenses Italy---1 person …………………………..………..…….$140

Gratuity/Tips…………………………………………………………..………….$150

Meals/Snacks in India ……………….…………………………..………….$400

Actor

On-camera…..………………………………………………………………..……$800

Snake Rent…..……………………………………………………...……..………$200

Costume purchase……………………………………………………..….…….$500

Traveling Costs………………………………………………………………....….$100

Meals/Snacks in Europe…………………………………………..…………...$300

SUB-TOTAL (PRODUCTION)………………………...............……… $9560

POST PRODUCTION (60 DAYS)

Director, Editors, Writer, Composer, Specialsts

Editor, Director,Writer (documentary script)

Inci Milano…………….........………………………….…………..……………Volunteer

Kenneth Valpey editing of script……………………............………….Volunteer

Editing Equipment and Facility

Editing System FCPX-2, I MAC (Director’s Home).....................Donation

Editing Software FCPX-2 Update Purchase/licensing…………….……………………………….......………….….$220

Technical Support…………….…………………………………….........……..….$100

Meals/snacks………………………………………..........……..Director’s Donation

Graphics and Animation

Titles creation and design………………………………….........……………$1200

Photo Movement (Inci Milano)…………………………....…..…………Volunteer

Color Correction

Color Correction (Inci Milano)……………………………............…….Volunteer

Sound Design and Recordings

Sound design/sound mix………………………………………….....………….$1500

Music Composer

Composer/Original Music Score…………………………………........……..$1500

Stock Footage/Photos

Stock footage licensing………………………………………….….........………..$800

Photos licensing…………………………………………………………......………..$500

Final Output/Mastering

Conversion from MXP to AS11 for TV channels……............…………. $1700

Closed Captioning and Subtitles

Translations..……………………………………………………..…………….....…….$400

Subtitle design and render (7 days)……………………………….........……..$250

SUB-TOTAL (POST-PRODUCTION)……………......................……… $8170

MARKETING AND ADMINISTRATION

Office/Admin/Promotion, Print, Publicity

Office supplies……………………………………………………....…………….…….$350

Internet (6 months)………….………………………………………......……………$360

Phone (6 months)…………………………………………………….....……………..$120

Postage/Shipping/Courier…………………………………………….…....……..$360

Print items: postcards, biz cards, posters…………………........………..…$360

Press materials………………………………………………………....………………..$500

Photographer for publicity stills……………………………….......……………..$500

Publicist (inci milano)…………………………………………….......………….Volunteer

SUB-TOTAL (MARKETING AND ADMIN)……….........................…… $2190

BUDGET SUMMARY

SUB-TOTAL (PRE-PRODUCTION)………........................………………… $720

SUB-TOTAL (PRODUCTION)………………….........................…………… $9560

SUB-TOTAL (POST-PRODUCTION)……….........................…………..… $8170

SUB-TOTAL (MARKETING AND ADMIN)……........................………… $2190

Fiscal Sponsor fee Indiegogo %5…….……………………………………..…$1032

Contingengy (%10)………………………………............................………... $2064

GRAND TOTAL……………………………….............................……………… $23736

 

 

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ASSOCIATE PRODUCER

$1,000 USD
As an associate producer of the film, you are contributing in a big way to the success of the film. Your contribution will earn you the title of Associate Producer in the film credits. You'll receive an autographed book of Kenneth Valpey, signed to your name, along with a personal letter of thankswith a letter of thanks and other perks above.
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  • ASSOCIATE PRODUCER CREDIT
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FILM SUPPORTER

$50 USD
Your support is truly appreciated and we will let the world know about it. you will receive a big thank you on our social media accounts.
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  • FILM SUPPORTER
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COPY OF THE FILM

$100 USD
On top of a special thank you on our social media accounts, you will also receive a copy of the film as a digital download once the film has premiered publicly.
Included Items
  • COPY OF THE FILM
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OFFICIAL SPONSOR

$200 USD
As a recognition for your contribution, we will thank you in the film credits, copy of the film as digital download and shout out on our social media accounts.
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  • OFFICIAL SPONSOR CREDIT
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GOLD SPONSOR

$500 USD
As a bit of extra recognition for your generous contribution, you will receive a a personal letter of thanks by Kenneth Valpey. Your gold sponsorship will include your business logo and your name featured in the film credits as a sponsor, a film digital download and shout out on social media as our gold sponsor.
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PLATINUM SPONSOR

$750 USD
You'll receive one autographed book of Kenneth Valpey, signed to your name, along with a personal letter of thanks. Your Platinum sponsorship will include your business logo and your name featured in the film credits as a sponsor, a film digital download and shout out on social media as our platinum sponsor.
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  • PLATINUM SPONSOR CREDIT
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EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

$2,000 USD
As the executive producer you are the biggest financial contributor to the film. Your support will earn you the exclusive title of Executive Producer in the film credits. Huge thank you on social media accounts. You'll receive 2 autographed books of Kenneth Valpey, signed to your name, along with a personal letter of thanksa and all the perks above
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  • EXECUTIVE PRODUCER CREDIT
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"FINANCED BY" TITLE

$5,000 USD
Your extreme generosity and interest in this project is humbling. In exchange for your contribution your name will be the FIRST listed in the film credits as 'Financed by'. A huge thank you on our social media account. We will gladly include reference to you or your business logo in the film. You'll receive all the perks above and three books.
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  • FINANCED BY TITLE
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