Maroesja Perizonius and Alice McShane’s impassioned, courageous, focused and confrontational documentary alleges the sexual abuse and rape of children in the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (AKA Osho) meditation communes in Britain, the US and elsewhere, in the 70s and 80s – by people who are in the same business right now. Names are named, questions asked, and certain ageing bland-faced hippy men are challenged on camera, their seraphic expressions of placid spirituality turning to fear and rage.
Children of the Cult grew out of widespread discontent among the now grownup Rajneesh children at the much acclaimed 2018 Netflix series Wild Wild Country, about the Rajneeshpuram cult in Oregon in the 80s. Although candid enough about the well-known bizarre criminality and charlatanism there that (temporarily) discredited the movement and its leader, the series failed to mention child sexual abuse. Grownup rape survivors therefore shared their stories on Facebook, leading to this fierce movie in which the film-makers travel to Europe, the UK and the US to record accounts of grotesque and unacknowledged crimes. As one interviewee puts it, the ashrams had something that attracted a certain kind of charismatic guy: “Free sex, and free sex with kids too.”
Many of the men involved seem to have extravagantly forgiven themselves for whatever minor lapses of which they consider themselves not especially guilty. They incautiously agreed to be interviewed, perhaps expecting lenient treatment, or something like the Netflix approach that implied it was something exotically sealed in the past.
That isn’t what happens here. And the same goes for those high up in the organisation: we get people whose faces are not pixelated, angrily stalking away from the camera. The unspeakable Rajneesh himself died in 1990 but his movement turned into the Osho International Meditation Resorts, with the Rajneesh’s picture visible on the walls; these are places at which survivors have spotted online some very familiar, ageing faces. Is a class action lawsuit out of the question?
• Children of the Cult is in UK and Irish cinemas from 4 October.
