If darkness belongs to the world of the dead and light to the world of the living, the surprising and beautiful Samsara makes us forget it. To see what's new by Galician Lois Patiño, you have to close your eyes, as Víctor Erice has whispered to us with his latest film, to remind us that the imagination (like the unconscious, cinema and life itself) is invoked from the shadows.
Samsara It happens in three times. The first happens in Laos, in a community of Buddhist monks, during a reading by a teenager of the Tibetan book of the dead (the Bardo Thödol) to a dying old woman and which, according to Buddhist belief, allows entry into the cycle of reincarnation. In the second half, the screen addresses the viewer and urges him to close his eyes, to feel and listen, to open them again – already in the third half and after experiencing this unique transit – in a fishing village in Zanzibar, where the simple plane of a hand will return the light to us.
Patiño (Costa da morte, Lúa Vermella) is part of the stimulating bastion of experimental and auteur cinema formed for years in Galicia, made up mostly of creators very attached to the sensory, very close to the ethnographic tradition of Portuguese cinematography and also to its rich cinephilia. In Samsara, Written with Garbiñe Ortega, one of Spain's most prominent experimental film researchers, Patiño (director and editor) moves between almost abstract compositions and hallucinatory splashes of color. The subtle allusions to the liquid quality of the image—the old idea of developing liquid as a kind of amniotic substance—and, above all, the work with saturated colors give the Samsara a unique and minimalist beauty, which manages to avoid the temptation of spruced-up exoticism or a neo-color therapy session. The common places are deactivated thanks to the immersion that Patiño proposes in the film's own material through the immersive exercise of closing one's eyes.
The ideas around color do not seem casual and when the camera films some girls coloring some drawings we understand that we are facing an investigation into the spiritual power of chromatic language: from the orange of the Buddhist monks to the African pinks, blues and reds. It's not just about seeing the colors, it's about feeling the inside.
Samsara He does not hide his affiliation with the work of the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but above all in his abstract nature there are echoes of such important conceptual artists as the American James Turrell. The immersions in light and color that Turrell has proposed for half a century in his visionary installations, the depth of his optical illusions, invoke the power of perception, its philosophical source, and remind us, like this beautiful and unusual film, that true art transcends the object to reincarnate in experience.
Samsara
Address: Lois Patiño.
Performers: Amid Keomany, Toumor Xiong, Simone Milavanh, Mariam Vuaa Mtego, Juwairiya Idrisa Uwesu.
Gender: drama. Spain, 2023.
Duration: 113 minutes.
Premiere: December 20.
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