Samsara

Samsara (2011) is a wordless documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Director Ron Fricke spent nearly five years shooting it across twenty-five countries on five continents, all on seventy-millimetre film.

There is no narrator, no plot, no cast in the usual sense. The camera moves from Tibetan monks building a sand mandala to vast factory floors, drowned ruins, packed cities and tribal rituals. Images rhyme with one another through shape and motion, leaving you to draw the line between people, nature and what we do to the land around us. A score by Lisa Gerrard and Michael Stearns stands in for any dialogue.

Fricke, the cinematographer behind Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi, pushes his silent visual-essay style to its limit, framing every shot like a still photograph. This is cinema that shows rather than tells, and it rewards a big screen, a quiet room and no hurry. Stream Samsara (2011) online on iFILM.