Beatle Films | Beatles Blog

Meeting The Beatles In India, the film we told you was in production way back in 2018, is finally set for its world premiere next month.

Meeting The Beatles In India is a documentary about The Beatles‘ historic 1968 trip to study Transcendental Meditation (TM) at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram retreat in Rishikesh. It was here the band immersed themselves further in the Maharishi’s teachings, and where they wrote so many of the songs that would appear on their next LP, The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album).

The film tells the story of a young man named Paul Saltzman, an American photographer on his own journey toward spiritual enlightenment who just happened to arrive at the ashram at the very same time as The Beatles.

Saltzman interacted with the band, watched as they composed, and took many of the now-famous photos from the time, including this iconic image featuring the band, their wives and girlfriends, Beach Boy Mike Love, Donovan, Mia Farrow, her sister Prudence, and others:

Narrated by Morgan Freeman, Meeting The Beatles In India features more than 40 previously unseen photos from Saltzman’s stay in India. There are interviews with others who were at the retreat too, including Pattie Boyd (former wife of George Harrison), her sister Jenny Boyd, and the man about whom John Lennon wrote the song ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’.

The movie also sees Saltzman discussing Transcendental Meditation with Twin Peaks director David Lynch (a huge advocate for TM), and footage of Saltzman paying a present-day visit to the now-abandoned ashram. He’s accompanied by the highly respected Beatle historian Mark Lewisohn.

Meeting The Beatles In India has its virtual world premiere online on September 9 via the Gathr Films website.

The new 4K digital restoration on BluRay and DVD of the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, approved by director Richard Lester and with 5.1 surround mix supervised by Giles Martin at Abbey Road Studios, is not officially out in the US until June 24.

And it’ll be July 21 until you can buy it on disc in the UK….

But AHDN is already up and available to buy or rent right now at the US iTunes store (click on image to see full size):

The key part of the page is here. All you need is a US iTunes account:

Interestingly when the film is released in hard copy it will have different covers for the US and European markets. It will also have different special features included for each version too – see Wog Blogs post on this here.