When Lois Patiño was 10 years old, she suffered a very serious accident. She was burned by a fireplace fire and was on the brink of death for many months. That is why she is very aware that “death can come at any moment.”
And that is also why his cinema has a lot to do with what lies beyond: “I believe that when we die everything ends, but I am interested in the answers that different cultures have given to the mystery that is hidden behind the death of a person.” explains the filmmaker in an interview with La Vanguardia.
This week Patiño premieres Samsara, a film that begins in Laos where a young Buddhist monk reads the Tibetan Book of the Dead to an old woman who is about to die. “It is a book that has to be read to you, because it must enter through your ear. A book that explains in very detail what you will find after death, the sounds, the colors, the evil and benign gods that will appear along the way, to calm the uncertainty of what happens after dying on a journey that can last up to 49 days.”
Samsara in Buddhism is “the cycle of life, death and reincarnation, it is the wheel of life which is also called the wheel of suffering, which is necessary to acquire a state of enlightenment.”
The filmmaker gradually delves into this story of death and resurrection told through the beauty of that Laos so unknown to the Spanish public. Suddenly, the director invites the audience to close their eyes and not open them until there is silence. It is worth following these instructions to enjoy a new and sensory cinema that will take the viewer to another equally beautiful place.
“I always look for an innovative ingredient in my films, I explore new narrative forms and it occurred to me to represent the invisible, explore the spectral through light and sound,” adds Patiño in reference to that unusual cinematographic journey.
A trip whose destination is Zanzibar, an island on the coast of East Africa whose inhabitants are mainly Muslim. “There the dead are wrapped in sheets or cloth and buried, unlike the Maasai culture, where they used to leave the corpses in the forest for wild animals to eat.” It is the way that the filmmaker has found to “close the idea of the different conceptions and rites regarding death.”
Samsara is a “radical” proposal, a film that is partly seen with your eyes closed, but it has been “very well received.” It screened at Seminci, is now in theaters in Brazil and will be released in Holland, England and Ireland. “The public is enjoying it a lot,” concludes the director.
