Cinemas are in an uncertain time. While masses of teenagers crowd every Marvel premiere and every popcorn saga, the moviegoing and adult public has lost the habit of going to theaters and almost all the bets destined for them in 2022 have been disappointing, unable to get them off their sofas and to turn off Netflix. They have been the ones that have proposed almost physical experiences, that recover that capacity of the cinema to amaze, the ones that have managed to transcend. This is well known by James Cameron, who has managed to get people to flock to see the sequel to Avatar because he has managed to make everyone stay with their mouths open again as if they were those spectators who saw the train arrive at the station. Ciotat and thought they were going to be overwhelmed by something they had never seen.
It seems like a bout to quote James Cameron to talk about the new film by Galician Lois Patiño, author of Lúa vermella or Costa da Morte. There cannot be two directors that are further apart in their way of conceiving cinema and narrative, but nonetheless his films appeal to that physical experience that involves watching a movie in absolute darkness and with a big screen. It gives the audience something they can’t have at home. Patiño’s Avatar is called Samsara, a film with which she competes in the Encounters section of the Berlin Festival and which proposes a story about reincarnation split in two. It is in that interval where the Galician director offers something that it is better not to reveal at all. Just to say that we could be facing the first film to see with our eyes closed. An overwhelming display of originality that he has dazzled with its beauty and uniqueness.
Patiño laughs when asked about this similarity with James Cameron, but admits that there is something in common, that “sense of exploring a new way of experiencing a room or transforming the cinema into something different from the usual”. “There is something of the audiovisual experience that is shared, in his case from hypertechnology and here from something much more primitive, simply closing our eyes and letting ourselves be carried away by the lights and sounds”, he explains.
Berlin will be the platform for a cinema like his, risky and looking for new forms of expression, to have an international outlet, and for him that is the job of film festivals, which exist to present “the avant-garde of cinema.” “It is where new avenues are opened. They are just radars that detect those films, those filmmakers who are expanding what is understood by cinema, those who are creating new languages and, in that sense, they are fundamental spaces. For me, who is interested in this type of cinema, a cinema that tries to innovate in cinematographic language, that tries to propose new narrative forms, is essential, but even so I consider my films very easy to watch. Easy because I am very interested in the beauty of the image and that the contemplative experience is very rich in sensoriality. They are films to let you go, only they have another temporality ”, he adds.
With each title he tries to “explore a cinematographic concept”. With Costa da Morte it was “the distance in the cinema”. With Lúa vermella it was “immobility”, presenting “immobile figures in the landscape and seeing what temporary cinematographic experience emerged from there”. With Samsara he wanted to “explore the invisible and the representation of the invisible in cinema.” “That’s when I thought of making a movie to watch with your eyes closed. It is born from there. Then I found the Tibetan Book of the Dead and I thought this ghostly journey through the afterlife was a fantastic element to link to closed eyes. And from there everything is born. He needed two spaces to be in one body and then reincarnate in another, ”he explains about his proposal.
15 minutes of eyes closed in a light and sound experience that turn the room “into an experience of collective meditation.” “That interested me a lot. That intimacy of the viewer’s experience and that introspection,” she points out. Samsara is also “a reflection on death and the afterlife and how cultures have responded to that mystery, to that anxiety that ignorance of what is after death can produce.” “To think if there is something or if a story has been created, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead does, in which what you are going to find is told step by step. And that is all to appease that anxiety. Galician culture created other myths that I already discussed in Lúa vermella, such as the witches or the Santa Compaña. They are stories that are created, myths and legends to cover these spaces of uncertainty, in this case death “.
For this light-sound interlude, he has explored artistic experiences that interested him, such as that of James Turrell, who “creates spaces of infinite light and explores how that light enters and leaves your body in some way, how that light invades you ”. An experience in which “with eyes closed, the eyelids fill with light and become the screen.”
While his previous films stuck to his land, to Galicia, this time he leaves Spain. The first part of Samsara takes place in Laos and tells the story of some Buddhist monks. The second travels to Zanzibar, where the women work collecting seaweed that they sell off to companies to make soap and creams. Two stories in which falling into orientalism and the tourist gaze was a risk that they were always aware of. To avoid this, the team, made up of four people who were completed with a team from each area, went over the script with them “many times to try to filter out all those possible exoticisms that might have slipped in.” They did the same with the dialogues, which allowed the actors to modify them to remove typical elements and to say them as they thought was most natural. A film that also hybridizes fiction and non-fiction, thus introducing the history of real people from each place.
The filming in Laos also put them face to face with the censorship of the place: “It is a communist dictatorship and there were certain elements that they were not allowed to include, that they did not like, and so we had to redo it and we did all the filming with a person from the Government with us. For example, they didn’t like the idea that the protagonist was a monk. They even have an article in a law that does not allow it. So I had to duplicate the protagonist, something that in the end enriched the film, because a duality is generated between the adolescent who is in the temple and the one who is not”, recalls the director.
A cinema that is related to names like those of Albert Serra or Oliver Laxe, who travel to the most important festivals but to which the awards usually turn their backs. For Patiño, “if the Goyas want to show the diversity or richness of Spanish cinema, they should make some kind of effort to find a way for these films to be reflected there.” He proposes measures such as creating an award “like the one that the Feroz Awards have, the Arrebato Award for films that explore new languages, and that could be something very positive.” Of course, he does not deny the cinema that awards the Academy and confesses that As bestas is one of the films that he has liked the most this year, “an extraordinary film on many levels and that achieves a balance between auteur cinema and commercial cinema ”.