The greatest cinema is often an exciting cocktail for the senses: sound and image in perfect harmony, intricately woven to create an immersive experience that transports us to another world. But what happens when one of those senses is numbed? Silent movies formed the foundations of visual grammar for audiences, and sound was a luxury audiences lived without for many years. Few films have attempted the inverse, plunging the viewer into darkness and relying on sound alone to guide them from one experience to another. Enter Galician filmmaker Lois Patiño's bold and beautiful “Samsara”, a meditative drama set between Laos and Zanzibar that tracks a soul moving between states of existence, and the lives that are touched in big and small ways by this cosmic rite of passage. The term ‘samsara' itself is the cycle of death and reincarnation as seen by Buddhism, and while it may sound familiar...
- 3/9/2024
- by Simon Ramshaw
- AsianMoviePulse
Berlinale Review: Samsara is an Extraordinary, Multisensory Journey Through Bodies, Souls, and Space
“Did you know that we keep on hearing after we’re dead?” The question comes up early into Lois Patiño’s Samsara but haunts the film from first shot to last, doubling as a précis of the multisensory feast this extraordinary journey through bodies, time, and space packs throughout. “Watching” is too restrictive a word for the kind of experience Patiño has arranged. Here’s the rare film that invites your whole body into its universe––one whose haptic, aural, olfactive pleasures are just as vivid as its visual riches. It’s a tale that unspools as a Heraclitean river: you cannot step into it twice, for it is not the same film, and you are no longer the same person.
Here’s where the river starts: in a Buddhist temple in present-day Laos, where teenage monk Be Ann (Toumor Xiong) crosses paths with a boy from a nearby village,...
Here’s where the river starts: in a Buddhist temple in present-day Laos, where teenage monk Be Ann (Toumor Xiong) crosses paths with a boy from a nearby village,...
- 2/22/2023
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
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