In Laos, young men live in Buddhist temples located amid spectacular, untamed natural wilderness. One of the boys regularly reads The Tibetan Book of the Dead to a dying old woman. She embraces the text as preparation for her reincarnation. Her soul is about to take flight—and with it the film itself, on the wings of sound and light. Patiño seeks to physicalise and cinematically manifest spirituality, the cycle of birth, death and reincarnation, daring to use cinema to evoke worlds outside the bounds of photographable images.
“With Samsara I doubled down on my commitment to the cinema that interests me, as a meditative and contemplative experience. In the middle of the film it becomes a collective meditation experience. Intimate and introspective, with the viewer closing their eyes for 15 minutes, listening to sounds. This can be powerful in a room full of people. /.../ Like all my films, the project came out of a formal exploration of the language of film. /.../ I wanted to explore the invisible. That's when I thought about the possibility of making a film to watch with your eyes closed. I came across The Tibetan Book of the Dead and found it to be the perfect text to link to this eye-closing cinema experience.” (Lois Patiño)
