Samsara is the Buddhist cycle of death and reincarnation, a bridge you won’t find on any map and which perhaps only cinema can attempt to draw. If a soul loses its body to find another, what does it feel? How does it sound? Viewers are invited to close their eyes and accompany the soul on its journey. Lois Patiño’s latest film opens the summer programme of La Casa Encendida.
| Target audience: | General public |
| Age: | From age 16 |
| Location: | Deck |
| Duration: | 2 hours |
| Price: | 4€ |
Samsara, by Lois Patiño. Spain, 2023. 113 min.
From the temples of Laos, living alongside adolescent monks, we follow a soul on its transit from one body to another through the Bardo Thodol. The words of the Tibetan Book of the Dead guide us safely through the afterlife as we journey through sound and light to our reincarnation on the beaches of Zanzibar, where groups of women work on seaweed farms.
Lois Patiño is a film-maker and artist who was born in Vigo in 1983. The son of the abstract painters Menchu Lamas and Antón Patiño, he began his film studies in Madrid at Escuela Tai while simultaneously studying for a degree in psychology at the Complutense University. He continued his film studies in New York and Barcelona, where he completed a master’s degree in documentary making at the Pompeu Fabra University. At the Universität der Künst in Berlin he took a series of video art courses and he has participated in workshops with film-makers such as Joan Jonas, James Benning, Pedro Costa, Víctor Erice, José Luis Guerín and Daniel Canogar.
His films have been shown at festivals such as Cannes, Berlinale, Locarno, Toronto, Rotterdam, New York, Ann Arbor, Viennale, IDFA, Ciné ma du ré el, Oberhausen and Clermont-Ferrand. His work has also been the subject of specific spotlights at events like the New York Film Festival (Views from the Avant-Garde), Flaherty Seminar (Colgate University), BAFICI (Argentina), Festival de Cali (Colombia), and NeMAF (South Korea).
Samsara ("cycle of life" in Sanskrit) is Lois Patiño’s third feature film, following on the heels of Costa da Morte (2013) and Lúa vermella (2020). It received its world première at the Berlinale Encounters (2023), where it won the Special Jury Award, and then went on to win the Golden Spike at Seminci 2023, the Best Documentary Award at the Forqué Awards, and the Feroz Arrebato Non Fiction Award (Special Award) at the last edition of the Feroz Awards.
Links of interest
Samsara, by Lois Patiño
