SAMSARA

US, 2012, 102 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Ron Friecke
Samsara comes from the makers of Baraka, a lavish and visual exploration of the world of nature and of human beings. This is the same intention for Samsara. The advertising for the film declares that it has been 25 years in the making, travelling and photographing extraordinary places with 70 mm film. Director/photographer, Ron Friecke, and his producer partner (also in editing and music supervision), Mark Magidson have collaborated on what is a cinema poem.

The film-makers say that they want the audience to contemplate humanity and reflect upon what links us to each other and to the world as a whole on this journey across 25 countries on five continents.

Five years in the making, this film is for the senses, eyes and ears, which requires the audience to surrender to it. There is no commentary or dialogue. The approach is not new because Fricke was Director of Photography and co-writer for Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi in the 1980s He made Baraka in the 1990s.
Samsara is a Sanskrit word meaning “the ever turning wheel of life” and this is the base both thematically and visually. From the startling opening shot of the close-up eyes of a Thai dancer there is a continuing and sense of the interconnection, as well as the transience, of all things - in the cycle of birth, life and death.
Some of the themes:
- monks making a mandala high in the mountains of Ladakh, India;
- Egyptian families living cheek-by-jowl with the great pyramids;
- Chinese assembly line workers chopping and packaging pig and chicken carcasses
- chickens helplessly being sucked into a large, ominous tractor that will kill them and prepare them for meals
- the night sky
- modern technology, production lines, and human robotics
- backdrops of deserts, garbage mounds as far as the eye can see, and traffic congestion in modern centres
- the processing of food to the consumption and effects it has on the human body
-impoverished communities picking over garbage as trucks deposit it
- exquisite Thai dancers
- a factory producing sex dolls
- highly developed cities seen from the air with freeway and building lights twinkling. . .
- many sacred grounds, disaster zones, industrial complexes, and natural wonders.

Shot on 70 mm film by Fricke, the imagery is extraordinary. It is all real, no computer graphics. While some things are familiar, they look new. The time-lapse photography reflects patience and camera mastery. Editing is often striking, a close-up of the eyes of an African woman blending into an LA freeway shot. Australian Lisa Gerrard is responsible for much of the score.