Samsara

‘I met with some of the most remarkable men and woman in the remotest regions, who were to leave a lifelong impression on me and forever change my way of looking at both the world and myself. That made me wonder: Are my desires responsible for my own destiny? Can one control or change the course of fate?’ With these reflections by Pan Nalin after a journey in the Himalayas, where he was looking for a spiritual base, the idea for Samsara was born.Tashi is a young Buddhist monk, who has just been meditating in solitude for three years. With a beard and long nails, he is brought back to the monastery, where he continues his prayers. But while blessing the harvest, he meets the peasant daughter Pema and suddenly his sexual consciousness is awoken. Tashi decides to leave the monastery and marry her. After all, he reasons, Buddha also spent 29 years getting to know the temptations of life before he turned his back on them. Tashi goes from one extreme to the other. He wants to experience everything: sex, unfaithfulness, treachery, fatherhood, passion and misery. But fate takes another term, so the story comes to an unexpected end.Samsara is the first film completely shot in Ladakh, an inhospitable but beautiful area of the Himalayas, to which the crystal clear photography does perfect justice.