LOVE EVOL(VED) by Steven Pearce is a sort of initiatory journey. The documentary, written, directed and starring Pearce himself, tells the protagonist's long journey to emerge from the tunnel of depression and reach a new conception of himself and the world. A journey that seems to take inspiration from his favorite book, Hermann Hesse's masterpiece Siddharta. The young Indian who sheds his old skin to follow a tortuous path in search of a new truth seems to represent the model to follow for Pearce. The starting point, therefore, is an act of refusal. In Pearce's case, his work as a doctor forces him to re-examine his entire professional sphere. When a young doctor suddenly realizes that the methods of Western medicine often appear inadequate for understanding the complex exchanges that regulate the relationship between body and spirit, and ends up feeling overwhelmed by a process that he should have dominated with detachment, perhaps due to too much empathy or more simply due to a sudden awareness of the objective limits of his professional action, what is put back into play, in addition to his inner existence, is his entire social world. A total reversal, therefore, of the points of view and ideas with which he used to approach reality. “Embracing opposites” is the new mantra of the new traveler. Reduce distances. Sewing up those wounds that no scalpel could ever generate and no needle could put back into place. The journey begins here. The first stage, at least cinematically, is the confrontation with his father, also a doctor. The man reveals to him that in the past he had had the same dilemmas as himself, that he too had felt lost and helpless in the face of the suffering of others. The revelation seems to partially alleviate the son's pain, but it is only the first step, the confrontation from which to try to start again. And here Love evolved manages to appropriate the expressive capabilities of pure cinema. It is cinema, which Pearce has loved since he was a child, which gives him the possibility of going back to childhood and adolescence, with a mix of period images, and it is always cinema which visually structures the meeting/confession with his father as a moment of pure dramaturgy, capable, by its very nature, of suggesting to the protagonist the path to catharsis. There could be no liberation from suffering, in fact, without a process of mirroring. Re-finding a bond with his father, discovering that he is like him, is the first act of reconstruction that follows the initial rejection of the world. From then on, the path can continue, linearly, even if in an always suggestive way, to the gradual rebirth, through the approach to the practices of spiritual psychology. But there is a second meeting, the one with the Panamanian mother. A woman, at least in appearance, profoundly different from the protagonist. She is a teacher, an educator, in love with her work, with life and with others. Once again the dramaturgical process seems to find its perfect fit with the traveler's experience: this new comparison no longer tells of a mirroring, but of a distance that we would like to bridge as soon as possible. The traveler will succeed in his aim by entering the world of spiritual psychology and finally concluding his journey out of the tunnel. The final realization will be as simple as it is devastating: anxiety and depression do not exist as objective elements, being simply the result of an incorrect perception of the world. Once the point of view changes, the perception changes, the expressive signs of the world suddenly change. If every crisis is nothing other than growth, the last stage of rebirth is the awareness that the wound was generated by the wrong angle from which things were seen. So, what language could describe this whole process better than cinema? Cinema, therefore, thought of as a therapeutic process. As a journey of rebirth. Now he can also resume the experience of the doctor, equipped however with a tool never had before: a superior gaze, a breath that embraces opposites, that mends distances, that unifies experiences.