The Cinematheque

Vancouver Premiere

“Part film, part guided meditation, it’s unlike anything else you can experience in the cinema … A strikingly original and profound artwork.”

Wendy Ide, The Guardian

Samsara is a sui generis cinematic experience, a hyper-immersive, transportative work whose baffling lack of North American distribution hasn’t dissuaded arthouses—in New York, Toronto, and elsewhere—from ensuring it still finds a path to audiences. Its concept is simple; its effects, profound: a gentle, observational tale of Buddhist reincarnation, beginning in a Laos temple and ending on a Zanzibar beach, is cleaved by a radical, 15-minute sequence of sensorial immersion that invites the viewer to close their eyes—not to deprive sight, but to see differently. Galician filmmaker Lois Patiño, whose practice shuttles between gallery installation and festival exhibition, achieves something truly transcendental with this alchemy of ​“slow cinema,” the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and avant-garde strategies inspired, in part, by hypnagogic hallucinations. As suggestive of Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Michelangelo Frammartino as it is of James Turrell or Tony Conrad, Samsara is an unmissable appointment with expanded, out-of-body cinema.

In Swahili and Lao with English subtitles
Advisory: Samsara contains strobing effects that may affect photosensitive viewers.

“A symphonic, spiritual journey … One of this year’s most sonically and structurally striking films.”

Arjun Sajip, Sight and Sound

“One of the more extraordinary feats of expanded cinema in recent memory.”

Jordan Cronk, Film Comment