Alex Mar is an American journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker based in the Hudson Valley and New York City.
Five years in the making, the film focuses on three members of fringe religious communities: Morpheus, a Pagan priestess building a spiritual sanctuary in rural California; Kublai, a Spiritualist medium working on a farm in upstate New York; and Chuck, a Lakota Sioux, raising his family according to his ancestors' way of life.
In the book, Mar also takes on the spiritual training required to be initiated into the Feri tradition and explores her own relationship to mysticism and ritual, as the daughter of Cuban and Greek immigrants.
It tells the story of a 15-year-old named Paula Cooper, who killed an elderly Bible teacher, Ruth Pelke, in a violent home invasion in Gary, Indiana, in 1985.
Paula was sentenced to death for the crime, only to have her victim's grandson Bill Pelke decide to publicly forgive her and campaign to spare her life.