October 6 "Samsara", which promises an extraordinary movie-watching experience, will appear in Lithuanian cinemas. Spanish director Lois Patiño intrigues with the quest to convey the invisible in cinema and invites the audience to immerse themselves in a collective meditation through an unusual act in the cinema - closing your eyes The film follows a reincarnation journey from Buddhist Laos to a seaweed farm in Tanzania in three parts.
Awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Encounters program of the Berlin Film Festival, Patiño aims to convey samsara, the cycle of life, death and rebirth in Buddhist terms, through the language of cinema. The film is atmospherically reminiscent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's cinematic meditations, but offers a completely new experience.
At the beginning, the film takes us to Laos, where a young Buddhist is crossing a river every morning. An old woman living on the other side is about to die. The young man reads her the "Tibetan Book of the Dead", a guide that helps not to get lost on the path to reincarnation. After the old woman's spirit leaves the body, he whispers the last words and plunges himself into meditation, wanting to accompany her on the journey of transformation. The new incarnation takes us to Tanzania, to women working on a seaweed farm.
About the idea of creating a film visualizing reincarnation in distant countries, Lois Patiño himself says: "I think the desire to understand and hear each other without imposing prejudices and truths is the true essence of knowledge and cultural exchange." This film exalts the diversity of the world, seeks and wants to show harmony between different cultures and religions."
Samsara was born from the desire to convey in the language of cinema what is beyond the visible world. Patiño took the ideas of how to recreate the posthumous journey of the soul to another incarnation in the language of cinema from director Derek Jarman's film Blue, flicker the works of experimental filmmakers using the technique and the American artist James Turrell, and the installation "Dream Machine" by Brion Gyslin with Williams S. Burroughs. One of the essential elements of Samsara has become the power of sound design to evoke images in the mind.
Filming on 16 mm film and experimenting with the essential elements of cinema - light and sound, Lois Patiño continues the tradition of the New Galician wave of cinema. Young innovative directors started to build on the foundations of the collapsed Galician film industry. Due to the 2008 they were limited by the low funding caused by the economic crisis, but at the same time they were freed from the usual frames of cinema. This encouraged to create boldly from more personal perspectives, not to shy away from formal experiments, sharp political and cultural reflections. These directors often film on 16 mm film, blur the boundaries of genres, deconstruct narratives, experiment with image and sound in search of the most suitable forms to express selected ideas and themes.
It is symbolic that with "Samsara" - a film about reincarnation - a new film publishing company "Taip pelda" is starting its activities. The name "So on" describes the main curatorial direction of the company, which turns away from the dominant European and North American film culture in Lithuania. These are not only geographical directions that will take you to the continents of Asia, Africa and South America on the cinema screen, but also offer curated content forms and ideas for viewers to travel, perhaps, further than usual and allow themselves to be surprised.
According to the founders, three friends and long-time colleagues, Mantė Valiūnaitė, Aistė Račaitytė and Ignė Smilingytė, the company "Taip teža" will look for depth, novelty, courage in the films: cinema that awakens minds and bodies. After discovering this, he will seek to use not commercial film distribution in his activities, but Book publishing practice in telling extended stories of films and their contexts. Lithuanian viewers will sometimes hear them from the first mouths of filmmakers.