This documentary features Krishna's Village of Peace, a festival in which 400,000 people from all over Poland participate. The festival has been going on for 8 years. The Hare Krishna devotees have been participating in it for 7 years.

 

It is a great endeavour to plan and organize the festival throughout the entire year. Devotees set up the festival 2 weeks before the event. The main tent is 100 meter long and 30 meter wide just like a football field. The kids can relax and sit in the tent as there is no other opportunity to actually do that. Krishna’s Village of Peace has 20 to 25 different tents around the village, showing different aspects of Vedic culture such as yoga, a book tent, a questions and answer tent etc. The festival features also a Vedic wedding ceremony.

 

Kids come for different reasons. Krishna’s Village is clean, colourful, blissful, entertaining and educational. People have the opportunity to chant the Hare Krishna mantra on beads. They will chant a couple of rounds with devotees, who explain the significance of the mantra.

 

Krishna consciousness is very attractive. There is a rich culture of thousands of years old with singing, dancing, feasting, philosophy etc. If devotees present it in an attractive way like this people are impressed.

 

Hare Krishna food distribution is a regular feature of the festival. The most popular tent is therefore the prasadam tent with 100,000 plates of delicious vegetarian meals distributed. 250 devotees alone are engaged in the kitchen cooking on huge pots. Throughout the day and even into the night prasadam is being distributed. Big lines of people waiting for prasadam is a familiar sight. Prasadam is available for a nominal fee so that kids respect what they receive. Donations come from different parts of the world to make this transcendental extravaganza possible.

 

It is wonderful to see so many people join in the kirtan and chant and dance in great ecstasy as devotees do harinam throughout the Woodstock area.

 

Devotees developed a strong and close relationship with Mr. Jurek Owsiak, the organizer of the Woodstock festival. Jurek is a humanitarian and a catholic. We are Hare Krishnas, we appreciate his faith and he appreciates our faith. It is a good example of how different religions can work together. We have the same principles, the same ethics and the same goal.

Jurek Owsiak raises 9 to 10 million dollars a year for his foundation, a charity organization, by means of a 24 hour national TV phone in. As a thank you for all the support he gets he puts on this Woodstock festival. Jurek is very popular amongst the young people. Woodstock is a free festival. Every year the number of people who are coming grows. Over 400,000 young people came this year. Jurek is helping devotees and they helping him to help the people to lead a better life and ultimately to receive this wonderful process of Krishna consciousness.

 

Devotees organize the festival in a big way. People come to the Woodstock festival because they like festivals. Devotees show the real culture of the spiritual world, where every living entity has an intimate loving relationship with Krishna, God, with the result that people will ultimately be attracted away from this material existence towards the spiritual sky, where all walking is dancing, all talking is singing and where there is a festival every day.

 

In the Village of Peace there is also a temple with Radha Krishna deities. Continuous kirtan is going on 15 hours a day. Often big groups of people are chanting Hare Krishna. There is also a dynamic programme of dancers and lots of kirtan with great and famous kirtaniyas. Artistic devotees from the Ukraine are helping out with the stage programme. There is help from devotees from throughout Europe and internationally as far away as from Australia and the USA. Devotees are working very hard and are putting in a lot of energy, which is all due to the inspiration of Indradyumna Maharaja.

 

It is wonderful to see how Lord Caitanya's mercy gets distributed to so many people. Devotees are convinced if they give people the positive alternative of Krishna consciousness then there is hope and they can become happy. They come to Woodstock and they experience that. Some come to Woodstock, visit Krishna's Village of Peace and don't even visit the other stages. They see through this festival the superiority of happiness in Krishna consciousness. People get a strong dose of Krishna consciousness. We are presenting philosophy, present culture, and are thus giving them an alternative to the miseries of material life by chanting Hare Krishna. Our motto is ‘chant Hare Krishna and your life will be sublime’. A special thank you goes to the devotees all around the world who contributed to make the Polish Festival of India such a success.