GUIDING LIGHT

SAMSARA Lois Patiño’s spiritual docudrama is like nothing you’ve ever seen…

Shall we address the elephant in the room?

My way of feeling or relating with the world is contemplative,’ admits Lois Patiño, the Spanish director behind Samsara. Part documentary, part transcendent journey, it began when Patiño encountered The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the most popular book on Tibetan Buddhism in the Western world. ‘I’m interested in how different cultures relate with death, with dead people, with the afterlife – myths, legends or stories they create around these afterlife experiences,’ he tells Teasers during the London Film Festival.

After visiting the Buddhist-following country of Laos, where he met templedwelling teens, Patiño decided to centre the first part of the film there. Shot in 16mm, this observational work sees young monk Be Ann (Toumor Xiong) aid an ageing, ailing woman called Mon (Simone Milavanh) as he reads to her from the aforementioned Buddhist text. Then comes the extraordinary moment as a caption invites audiences to close their eyes: the screen goes black before emitting light pulses in a 15-minute sequence every bit as immersive as 2001: A Space Odyssey’s ‘Stargate’ scene.

‘I thought about that film because it’s a sensorial, colourful trip to another dimension,’ says Patiño in reference to Stanley Kubrick’s deep-space epic. ‘I think we have something in common.’ Here, though, this meditative montage of sound and light is meant to represent Mon’s soul as it reincarnates into another body in Zanzibar, Tanzania. All set amid the rarely-shown seaweed farms of this stunning but remote archipelago, Patiño notes: ‘Most of the time we are watching Western cultural life. And I think it’s important to try to have different cultural references.’

‘The only thing that you need [to watch it] is darkness’

LOIS PATIÑO

One of the goals, he adds, was to ‘celebrate the cultural diversity and how we can live – more a desire than a reality – in harmony, all together’. Particularly inspired by artist James Turrell’s work Breathing Light, Patiño’s 15-minute metaphysical sound-and-light show has been a major talking point ever since it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award in the Encounters strand. ‘I am really happy,’ Patiño admits. ‘In every screening, more than one person approaches me to say, “Thank you, I will never forget this experience.” For me, that’s amazing.’

Patiño – who made his debut with 2013’s Coast of Death, an experimental doc set in Galicia, in Spain, where he’s from – would encourage anyone to see Samsara in the cinema. But he does believe that it could play just as well at home. ‘I think it will work. It’s more intimate. And you can be with your partner or by yourself,’ he says. ‘The only thing that you need is darkness.’ The big difference is that in movie theatres light is reflected off the screen, making it more powerful. ‘And the thing that you miss is the collective experience.’

SAMSARA IS IN CINEMAS FROM 26 JANUARY 2024.