Welcome to SAMSARA

I went to a school called life and taught myself cinema.

I always knew that I wanted to make films, even before I saw one at the age of nine. I lived in a very small and poor village in India, next to a railway junction where many trains stopped but only to exchange passengers. My village was nobody's destination.

As a kid I sold tea on this unique railway platform. I would often sit on the deserted rail track, waiting eternally for a train to arrive, staring at five empty cups of tea, hanging from my five fingers.

Today, in Bombay, as I sit in front of my PowerBook, staring at my five fingers on the keyboard, a tiny caret blinks with the regular pulse of a heart-beat on the screen. A noisy swatch ticks away on my wrist. An air-ticket to Paris, a few papers and a cup of tea lie next to the PowerBook..

So much has happened between two cups of tea. And all the happenings in our lives are the result of our desire and destiny.. Samsara is the story of desire and destiny. Samsara is the story of a celebration of life. By making documentary films, I have often keenly observed the lives of other people. Through the reality unfolding in front of the camera, I have shared the fruits of many people's destiny; their grief and joy. Documentaries have given me access to confront so-called reality. I filmed the destinies of a few chosen subjects with no control over anything except what to set my eyes and ears upon.

I loved the form and filmed destinies and desires as they were, not how they existed in my imagination. Desire often arises in Samsara, the world, where we live. Like all other beings, I live all kind of desires. My desire to tell the story of Tashi and Pema comes from my imagination and my imagination probably comes from what I have lived. In one way or another we return to reality. We return to life.

Life gave me the opportunity to lead a spiritual and religious childhood with my family. I was told and re-told fascinating stories about Buddha and the Hindu gods. But it was only later, while roaming the Himalayas, that the seed of 'Samsara' was sown.

I met with some of the most remarkable men and women who live in the remotest regions of Ladakh, Zanskar, Spiti, Sikkim and Bhutan... who were to leave a life-long 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? To tell Tashi and Pema's story is also to control their destiny. I can play god for 140 minutes at the rate of 24 frames per second. My desire to make 'Samsara' and not any other film, also comes from the feeling that it is time to tell this story.

To tell this story in the simplest way possible, with an approach straight from the guts. The mind should only tackle the cinematographic treatment, which, for me, is to work with the smallest number of elements possible. Like Zen, less is more. Samsara is the world; both inside the monastery and outside it. It is the story of a lama, Tashi, who leaves the monastery to become a farmer, to live a worldly life. And it is the story of Pema, his wife,
who possesses the qualities of a sage, while living in the world. In short, it's all about living or leaving or both. We all, at one point or another in our lives, are tempted to change things, escape or leave everything and go somewhere.

Samsara is the story of that somewhere.