Review of Am Anfang war das Licht

"Am Anfang war das Licht" or "In the Beginning There Was Light" is an Austrian 90-minute documentary from 2010, so this one is already over half a decade old. Writer and director is P.A. Straubinger and this one here is easily his most known work, which also has to do with the fact that he is far from prolific. Anyway, with this film here he gives an insight into the subject of some people living without food, maybe even without drinking and solely living off light. Or I should add "allegedly" because in my opinion this is all a huge scam. And actually it would be better not to provide the likes of Jasmuheen with further attention, so they can get even richer and sell more books etc. And they can also not bait people into killing themselves because they believed in the concept like that lady in the woods. In Germany, we have a proverb saying "von Luft und Liebe leben" and that's what the people in this documentary do, but not just metaphorically like in the proverb. So yeah I am very skeptical and I don't believe in the concept, no matter how many years of meditation may have preceded it. If it is really true then why won't they put these people for 10 days under permanent surveillance and see if they are not secretly having a meal? This would be the evidence then and then it also makes sense to run blood tests etc. to explore this unique phenomenon. But not before really scrutinizing them. So yeah, overall I give this documentary a thumbs-down, not because it was handled badly (on the contrary, for a first film it was pretty solid, far from a failure really), but I find the concept pretty revolting and not deserving of the attention. Another weakness is that it got too scientific in the second half. All in all, I give it a thumbs-down. If you still want to see these 1.5 hours, make sure you got a good set of subtitles as with all the languages included in here, it seems unlikely you really understand everything else otherwise.