High on a Swiss mountainside, a psychiatrist and a Zen master turn a monastery into a laboratory for questions science rarely touches.
What is Descending The Mountain about?
Descending the Mountain follows Franz Vollenweider and Vanja Palmers as they design a legally sanctioned study pairing psilocybin with the rhythms of retreat life on Mount Rigi. The volunteers come from a Zen community that has practiced long silent sitting for years but never touched a psychedelic substance, which makes the monastery an unusual meeting point between contemplative discipline and clinical research. The film tracks how participants prepare, sit through the effects of the mushrooms inside a structure already built around ritual and routine, and afterward try to put words to what happened when meditation-trained attention met an altered state. Woven through these sessions are conversations with Sister Theresia Raberger and Dr. Peter Gasser, each bringing a different vantage point, one rooted in faith, the other in medicine, on where the edges of ordinary consciousness might sit. The project treats the experiment as both a scientific inquiry and a philosophical one, asking whether a substance banned exactly five decades earlier still has something to offer a warming, fractured world. Rather than dramatizing the psilocybin experience with visual effects, the director lets the setting itself, the quiet of the mountain, the discipline of the retreat, carry the weight of what participants try to describe. The result plays closer to an observational record than an advocacy piece, following one tightly bounded study rather than arguing a broad case for psychedelic medicine.
About the cast
Vanja Palmers, the Zen teacher who helped design the retreat, and psychiatrist Franz Vollenweider anchor the film as its two central figures, one bringing decades of meditation practice and the other a clinical research background. Sister Theresia Raberger and Dr. Peter Gasser appear as additional voices inside the experiment, each offering a distinct perspective on what the sessions are meant to reveal.
Context & significance
The film arrives amid a wider resurgence of scientific interest in psychedelics, often called a psychedelic renaissance, after decades in which research on these substances was largely frozen following blanket prohibition. Mount Rigi's monastery setting gives the project a distinct texture: instead of a hospital or a lab, the backdrop is a place already organized around silence, discipline, and long-form attention, which the filmmakers treat as part of the experiment rather than incidental scenery. Documentary access to a legally sanctioned study lets the film sit closer to its subjects than most reporting on this topic manages, following the process from setup through reflection rather than reconstructing it after the fact.
Watching Descending The Mountain on Ktime
Descending the Mountain can be watched on K-Time with a free account login, part of a documentary catalogue built for Persian-speaking audiences around the world. The platform's Farsi-language interface makes it simple to browse and queue titles like this one alongside other international nonfiction, and at well under ninety minutes it fits comfortably into a single sitting.