The mysteries of the afterlife come to the foreground in Spanish filmmaker Lois Patiño’s latest feature Samsara, in which a soul leaves behind its dying body in Laos and settles within a new host in Zanzibar.
I think most filmmakers and artists maintain some threads from our previous work that we want to continue and I’m very interested in, I was reflecting on death and the fantastical imaginings around death in Galician culture. I also started to explore the idea of the invisible, how cinema can reflect the invisible, and then the very literal idea of watching a film with our eyes closed came to me. A little bit after, I found the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’ with a description of what we find in the afterlife, with a lot of details in terms of sounds and images. I was fascinated by the book and I thought it was a perfect match with the idea of watching a film with your eyes closed, so I thought, ‘Okay, let’s make the trip into the afterlife following the book with its cinematographic, sensorial, immersive experience.’
