SAMSARA
Sun 24 Sep | 6.50pm
Single Cinema Ticket: $15
Prices exclude SISTIC booking fees
SINGAPORE PREMIERE
Spain | 2023 | 114 min | PG
Lao, Swahili with English subtitles
Directed by Lois Patiño
SYNOPSIS
SAMSARA is a story split in two: two continents, two communities, two belief systems, two sets of experiences and inner lives. Between them lies a sensory pathway, all light and sound. The viewer is only asked to close their eyes and travel with it.
In Laos, a young man named Amid is tending to a dying woman. He takes his boat out on the Mekong River. One day he meets a novice monk, Bee An, who asks about the book he carries. Amid explains that he carries the Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and that he has been reciting it to her. It is “a book that someone has to read to you,” Amid says. He returns to the woman and sees her bid farewell to her belongings. Amid’s adult life is beginning where hers is near an end. He drips water on her hand to wake her up. “What can I do,” Amid reads to her, “now that I am dead?” With a group of monks from Bee An’s temple, Amid travels downriver to the Kuang Si waterfalls. While there, the woman passes away.
Another drop, another hand. The story moves to Tanzania, where a young girl named Juwairiya wakes up to the news that a baby goat has been born. She names it Neema, the Arabic word for blessing. Juwairiya lives with her family in Uroa, a village on the East coast of Zanzibar. Local women farm seaweed and make soap. The men catch fish. “Life is change”, Juwairiya’s grandmother explains. There is regeneration in the air.
DIRECTOR’S BIO

Lois Patiño (Galicia, Spain, 1983), filmmaker and artist, has shown his films at festivals such as Cannes, Berlinale, Locarno, Toronto, Rotterdam, New York, Viennale, IDFA, Oberhausen. His most recent works Sycorax (2021) and The Sower of Stars (2022) have premiered at Cannes Quinzaine and Berlinale Shorts. His two feature films Costa da Morte (2013) and Red Moon Tide (2020) premiered at Locarno and Berlinale Forum. His last feature SAMSARA premiered at Berlinale Encounters (2023) winning the Special Jury Award. He is currently working on two other films, to be premiered in 2023 and 2024.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
SAMSARA delves into some constants that I have been exploring in my work: the reflection on the relationship between the human being and the landscape, an anthropological interest focused especially on the mythical, spiritual, or the will to take the viewer to an intimate and meditative experience. In my previous films, I have developed concepts that tend to ‘empty’ the image, such as distance, duration of immobility. The human figures in these films appear very distant or paralyzed, suggesting a disappearance, a dilution of the human being in the landscape. In SAMSARA I continue to work from the Freudian concept of the ‘oceanic feeling’: to be feeling as part of the whole, as the drop of water is an indivisible part of the ocean; an idea of spiritual communion also present in the concept of Buddhist Enlightenment that the project explores.
In SAMSARA I wanted to take this ‘emptying’ of the image one step further and explore more deeply the idea and representation of the invisible in cinema. That’s when the idea came up to make a film which should be watched with your eyes closed. I wanted the cinematic experience to be closer to the meditative one, and for the theatre to become a space for collective meditation. On the other hand, I find interest in the multiplication of the image provoked by the gesture of closing our eyes. That way the sound will evoke different images to each viewer. This also allows a singular perceptive experience derived from the fact that it is the eyelid, soaked in light, which becomes the screen. The Tibetan Book of the Dead – a detailed description of what we will find in the afterlife – seemed to me an optimal place to develop this cinematographic proposal of closed eyes, as it is a spectral space, where the evanescent and fleeting acquire greater presence.
PRINT SOURCE
Jorge Blanch
festivals@benditafilms.com
benditafilms.com
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