SAMSARA

PROGRAM NOTES

Lois Patiño’s Samsara is a luminous meditation on death, rebirth and the passage between worlds. Beginning among a community of Buddhist monks in Laos, the film follows a young man who reads the Bardo Thödol to an elderly woman approaching death before crossing into a radically different landscape on the shores of Zanzibar. Between these worlds, Patiño asks the audience to close their eyes, transforming light and sound into a collective cinematic experience somewhere between dreaming and meditation. Shot on 16mm and moving between Lao and Swahili, Samsara dissolves boundaries between bodies, landscapes and states of consciousness, imagining cinema itself as a passage from one form of life into another.

Cinema Sanctuary is a film initiative devoted to cinema as a shared space for reflection, inquiry, and encounter. We present films from around the world that explore spiritual experience, existential crisis, and encounters with the sacred. Treating cinema not simply as entertainment but as a communal, contemplative practice, Cinema Sanctuary invites audiences to slow down, sit with complexity, and experience films collectively.

RELEASE DATE

February 2023 (Berlin premiere)

PRODUCTION

Señor y Señora Films / Filmika Galaika / El Viaje

WRITERS

Lois Patiño / Garbiñe Ortega

DIRECTOR

Lois Patiño

CAST

Amid Keomany / Toumor Xiong / Simone Milavanh / Mariam Vuaa Mtego / Juwairiya Idrisa Uwesu / Bernedeta Gaspar

LAURELS

Special Jury Prize, Encounters — 2023 Berlin International Film Festival

DIRECTOR FILMOGRAPHY

Montaña en sombra, 2012 / La imagen arde, 2013 / La muerte trabajando, 2013 / Costa da Morte, 2013 / Noite sem distância, 2015 / Strata of the Image, 2015 / Fajr, 2017 / Lúa vermella, 2020 / ML-AP, 2021 / Sycorax, 2021 / El sembrador de estrellas, 2022 / Samsara, 2023 / Piedra que fue piedra, 2023 / Lavadoiro, 2024 / Ariel, 2025

FURTHER READING

Lois Patiño on Samsara — BFI Sight and Sound