Samsara

Ron Fricke's second wordless documentary, made about twenty years after Baraka. The method is the same: no narrator, no dialogue, no plot. The images were gathered from more than twenty-five countries over a shooting period spread across years. The subject is in the title: the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. The film does not explain the idea, it builds it through sequence. A section that begins with monks making a sand mandala closes at the end with the mandala being swept away. Among the images, the industrial passages are particularly hard: chicken farms, slaughterhouse lines, electronics assembly belts and waste grounds come one after another, and the film adds no comment. The technical side matters again. Samsara was shot on 70mm film and transferred digitally at high resolution; the level of detail in the image becomes a subject of the film itself. The natural continuation of Baraka for anyone who likes visual cinema and wordless storytelling. For a viewer expecting guidance, the film explains nothing; the work of making meaning is entirely the viewer's.