Samsara

Based on the book Bardo Thodöl, also known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text considered sacred to the religion of Buddhism, Lois Patiño imagines a visual and, at a certain point, also a physical meditation on what happens after death. The first part of the film (which is divided into two distinct moments) takes place in Laos, contemplatively portraying the rhythm and meditative state of a life dedicated to the practice of religion as something fundamental. In a monastery, we follow daily life, particularly that of a young man (Amid) who takes on the mission of reading the Bardo to an elderly lady (Mon) who is close to death. As Amid says, this is a book that must be read by someone from the outside, because it contains the instructions for what must be done after death, on the path to rebirth. However, Amid is afraid that he won't have enough time to finish reading the book to Mon before she dies.

The encounters between the two reveal a tenderness and complicity, and as she says upon waking, “It’s a good thing we have dreams. When we fall asleep, they tell us such beautiful stories.” This is an approximation of the oneiric universe of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Amid takes on the task of reading the book to Mon, but he is also reading the book to us, the audience. Thus, we hear not only the principles of Buddhist belief, such as the “beauty of taking on a new form,” but also instructions that prepare us for the transformation of this journey into the unknown. Before that, however, the daily life in this place approaches a dream space, where the ephemerality of time is confused with an immutability of the present world. This feeling is confirmed by a stripped-down visual approach, anchored in the phantasmagorical beauty of the images, the hypnotic sound of nature, and the lull of existence. In this limbo where time seems to show no signs of its passing, we see Amid and the monks occupied with spiritual matters, but also with concerns and hopes for their future.

It is, however, at the fateful moment of Mon's death that Lois Patiño takes a bold step, asking through a few lines of text that the viewer close their eyes for the following moments. The aim is to feel only through the light that occasionally occupies the darkness and the sounds that envelop one like a hug, as an approximation of this interval between life and death. It is a daring moment because it also demands the cooperation of the audience, in a reciprocity that is rare in a film, as well as their vulnerability—with eyes closed in a room full of strangers and faced with the uncertainty of the unknown. For several long minutes, if you risk opening your eyes, you might see patches of different colours in brief flashes in the darkness. But the best thing to do is to keep your eyes closed to feel the effect of the light passing through your eyelids, and to let yourself be carried away by a sensory experience that is unique in a cinema hall. This also serves as a reminder of the collective experience of cinema as a communal sharing.

When we return from that journey, that is, when we open our eyes again, they take a while to get used to the light and a new landscape. In the second part of the film, the action moves to the Zanzibar archipelago, located in the Indian Ocean, to follow the life of a newborn baby goat—the possible reincarnation of Mon's spirit. Patiño uses two distinct cinematographers for each of the parts. While in the first part Mauro Herce films Laos as an ethereal space of spiritual transcendence, with the Buddhist monks fading or blending with nature, in this second part, Jessica Sarah Rinland focuses on the material side of this world, often giving attention to the details of the manual labour of the inhabitants of this land. Under the pretext of following the little goat and the child who adopted it as a pet, we end up hearing different conversations from this community. If the dialogues here reflect a more direct concern with the materiality of the world, evoking the idea of the repetition of mundane life in the face of death, by making the connection with the concern about the continuity of life from the first part, Patiño finds a poetic harmony, in a culmination of the themes of ephemerality and mortality that he has been exploring in his cinema. In the Buddhist religion, the word "samsara" refers to the natural cycle of life as a series of deaths and rebirths. Here, is Samsara the life that continues, the memory that endures, the cinema that allows us to live?