Saturday, July 19, 2008

Mystical Brain
. . . Virtual Theater from SnagFilms.com



The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg is great at finding new technological toys and tricks. He recently discovered SnagFilms.com, which allows all of us with websites, or some semblance thereof, to participate in movie distribution:

Thousands of feature-length documentary films are produced every year, but almost nobody gets a chance to see them. A few dozen are shown to small audiences at major film festivals, and a handful make it into theaters. For every blockbuster like "An Inconvenient Truth," there are hundreds of documentaries that never find an audience.

Starting Thursday, however, there will be a new online service that aims to change all that. The service, called SnagFilms, allows anyone with a blog, a Web site, or even a page on a social-networking site, to open a virtual movie theater and show these documentaries, free. The virtual theater is a small widget that contains the film, and that can be embedded easily and quickly in a wide variety of popular social-networking services and blog platforms. No technical knowledge is needed.

For my contribution, I chose the feature "Mystical Brain", a Canadian documentary that asks:

Is it possible to shed light on the states of grace experienced by mystics and meditators? In MYSTICAL BRAIN, the documentary filmmaker Isabelle Raynauld shows us the most recent discoveries of scientific research on this phenomenon.

I was actually attracted by the PET and MRI images contained within.

Get out your popcorn and enjoy!

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