Director – Lois Patiño – 2023 – South Korea, Spain – Cert. U –113m
*****
The story of two lives – an old woman dying in Laos and a goat born in Zanzibar – and the connection between them – plays the 2023 London Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, October 4th until Sunday, October 15th, and will be out in UK cinemas in the new year on Friday, January 5th
You think you’ve seen everything there is to see in movies and then along comes a movie that does something unexpected that completely breaks the mould. In the middle of this film, we are invited to close our eyes and not open them again until asked; if we follow this instruction, something extraordinary occurs.
The word Samsara is used in a number of Asian religious systems (notably Hinduism and Buddhism) to denote the idea of a constant cycle of reincarnation: you are born, you die, you are reborn in another form, you die, you are reborn in another form, an so on. This idea is contrary to that of the Judeo-Christian religions in which you are born, you die, once only, and you are judged.
What Samsara does so brilliantly is show us the first of these two systems, showing the end of one life and the beginning of another.… Read the rest