Meetings with Remarkable Men

The film follows the youth of G. I. Gurdjieff and the search he described himself: a young man sets out to find answers to his questions about how the world works and looks for teachers in the mountains, the deserts and the monasteries of Central Asia. The people he meets along the way show him another way of knowing through music, dance and brushes with death, and the sacred dance sequences at the end are that teaching made visible. The screenplay of Peter Brook’s hundred and eight minute film was written by Brook with Jeanne de Salzmann from Gurdjieff’s own book. Dragan Maksimović plays the young Gurdjieff, with Terence Stamp, Athol Fugard and Warren Mitchell in the cast. Much of it was shot in Afghanistan, in places that had barely been filmed before.