‘Samsara’
Manager: Lois Patino
Artists: Cross by Keomany, Toumour Xiong, Simone Milavanh
Year: 2023
Premiere: 12/20/23
★★★
Representing ‘new Galician cinema’ alongside Lois Patiño, Oliver Laxe, Diana Toucedo and Eloy Enciso. His best-known film, and one of the films that sparked this new cinematography, is ‘Costa da Morte’, a documentary about fishermen and workers in that part of Galicia. Exactly 10 years after this movie, where nature and God seem to be united, Patiño leaves his theoretical comfort zone to film a story about the transmigration of the soul in Laos and Tanzania. The rhythm, voice work and some fantasy elements of the first part may remind us of Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul cinema.
We see it almost coded documentarythe daily life of some Buddhist novices in a temple, and a boy’s readings to a dying woman. He reads to him the book that will be his guide in the afterlife. I don’t know if it’s the most interesting part of the film, but the middle block is an interesting way of reflecting this migration onto the screen: first in black, then through layers of intense color, and finally through strobe lights. Gaspar Noé used them and at times they remind us of the final journey of Kubrick’s ‘2001 space voyage’, but here the journey of experimental lights has a different meaning. Then comes the African part, the reincarnation part, which is followed by another experiment with visual textures..