2023-12-21 22:25:17
Updated Thursday, December 21, 2023 – 21:25
After a long journey through festivals (it won a prize in Berlin), Lois Patio’s film that invites the audience to close their eyes arrives in theaters convinced that there is an alternative to the colonization of the screens.
A moment from ‘Samsara’, by Lois Patio.MUNDO
The usual thing is that films are there to be watched, observed, analyzed and, if necessary, forgotten. The strange thing, however, is that they are the ones who look at us, observe us and, do not doubt it, remember each of our gestures even better than we will ever be capable of. Samsarafrom Galician Lois Patio, is one of them. The most daring and voracious of all. It was presented at the last edition of the Berlin Festival and, in addition to winning the required prize, it became the biggest attraction. And revelations even.
It was very exciting, says the director, still surprised, people came up to me to tell me that I had changed their lives. I didn’t know how to take it. And since then, the, shall we say, mystical fever has only grown. Thanks to the Letterboxd application (the movie social network), the director has not stopped collecting, spying on, and even tattooing reactions. And it is not so much a question of enthusiasm, but also of dedication. I even remember, he says modestly, that someone even said that he saw their dead relatives. In truth, it is the spectators who, with their experience, complete the film.
And why so much passion? The film narrates the eternal existence, if you will, of a soul that travels from Laos to a coastal town in Zanzbar. In reality, metempsychosis – which is what the Greeks called psychic migrations – is nothing more than a pretext to explore, from different geography, the power of two views as different as they are complementary, as strange from each other as they are indissoluble. In the first part of the film, the camera follows a group of young Buddhists and the reader of stories to a dying woman. In the second part, it is a girl who with her goat (or the other way around) invites us to look at the ground, the sky and, most importantly, the sea. The idea was always to watch and record, but from respect, from humility, always fleeing from the paternalistic gaze that romanticizes what it ignores, comments Patio as a work guide.
And in the middle, on the journey from one end of the world to the other, Samsara proposes to stop seeing with our eyes. And close them. The cinema screen is filled with lights, rumors, spirals and abysses. But you don’t have to look. Or, better yet, you have to look at it another way. In some way, the screens are duplicated. The film is projected on the viewer’s eyelids with the same clarity as it is in their imagination., the director himself reflects, always modest. It’s not that the film’s ideology was gone from the beginning, but that’s what those who have seen it or, better yet, not seen it, have told it.
The truth is that Samsara, far beyond the successes of the unprecedented, ends up being a manifesto on the cinema of the future; a project built on the desire, which is also a need, to recover the sense of time, the sense of the image, the certainty of recognition.Samsara was filmed in Laos, in Zanzbar and is filmed every day when it is projected on the viewer’s eyelids. And from there, she looks at us.
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