Baraka — A movie that moved me
Some movies are life-lessons
It is not very often that I get to write about a movie I loved watching. Baraka — a Sufi word meaning “Essence of Life” — was directed by Ron Fricke, the father of Time Lapse camera, and his extremely dexterous crew! ‘Baraka’ is not one of those movies, which relies completely on aged protagonists performing unearthly stunts, defying logic and laws of Physics and romancing girls that are two generations younger to them. It is one of those very few movies that will move the soul in you.
I watched it today morning and thought ‘Yes, it did lay an impact in me and I ought to write about it’, and here I am, sitting over coffee and sharing my experience. There are millions of documentaries that have similar kind of cinematography, but fail to impress us. How is Baraka any different from any of them?
Let us delve into what Baraka is all about and analyze it like a 16 mark question:
1) It is about Spiritualism. The movie opens with a time-lapse from dusk to dawn, and how the recently woken up world starts its day. There is a smooth transition between the devotional standards across nations. We get to see — an old man performing Surya Namaskaram in Varanasi, a man devoutly perusing through the pages of Quran, and the morning prayers inside a Church in the Vatican. There is also a huge gathering of men encircling and facing a huge-and-wide Buddha statue with all of their fingers fluttering like the wings of birds and synchronously shouting what they call is their prayer. People from each Religion perfected their morning rituals with utmost commitment, despite physical ordeals. We can realize what Spiritualism can do to us(via the magnitude of their joy and energy), when the same cannot be done by denying it.
2) Baraka is all about Nature. The movie is rich with uncanny visuals of waterfalls, forests, clouds, rains and animals. Baraka shows the stunningly elegant cultivable lands of the world, and how they are deplored using deep land mines, to erect skyscrapers. It juxtaposes the sorrowfully busy lives of people living in Tokyo/NYC with the delightful lives of aborigines that belong to the forests of Kenya, Australia and a few other countries. We get to see a stunning time-lapse of various parts of world cities and how pathetic are people of these cities for being blessed with a mechanical life. In contrast, the movie goes around a number of picturesque locales, limns the lifestyle of tribes that are connected to nature and how happy they are despite being illiterate.
The portrayal of — unusually beautifully women from Kenya sporting their hand-made accessories around their necks, hands and ears, dancing joyfully, and an Amazonian girl, who is surrounded by leaves, sporting a curious look — are worth mentioning. We pity them for not being educated, and in turn, they guffaw at us for running behind money and not having connected ourselves with our Mother Nature. The movie offers some surreal visuals of mountains, wildlife, waves and waterfalls from APAC to LATAM including Nepal, the Iguacu Falls in Argentina, Ayers Rock in Australia, Cambodia, Bali, Utah, etc.
3) Baraka talks about tyranny. Yes. This is what differentiates Baraka from the other documentaries. It also deals with all the fateful injustices that exist in this world at large. It shows a large hall in South America where thousands of women make cigarettes, whose children roam around the streets as illiterates. It also suffuses the state of extreme penury, where hobos lie on the roads with no care for their children and livestock, soldiers dying for their countries in war-front, and a group of scavengers fighting over stale food they just got in a dumpyard. On the other hand, there are ‘rich’ call girls, who used to dance in pubs and parties for their survival, sporting a cold stare at us haplessly. There is a part, which shows a fast food industry mutilating recently hatched chickens and how they are butchered to make our evening snacks, whereas, in a forest, an Orangutan is swimming in a pond covered with steam. It looks as though the Orangutan is having the time of his life in the woods, like a monk, who has given up everything but happiness.
4) Baraka was filmed out of passion. As simple as that. Anything that is done out of passion, especially movies and arts, turns out more beautiful and satisfying than expected. Baraka stands out because of the effort and patience(it took 14 months to film it) that was put in, to rock the soul in us. Ron and crew didn’t do it for money, as they could have easily sold it to the biggies in Hollywood for a huge amount. Instead, they sat for years, tailoring the movie to suit our senses and released it themselves. Baraka was filmed in 150+ locations in 24 countries including India, Australia, Kenya, Zaire, UAE, Nepal, Indonesia, USA, Japan…Phew! I would not travel this far for a single movie, even if I had enough money to do that. It was Ron and Crew’s fervor to capture the vagaries of cultures and the intricacies involved in them, which made Baraka a masterpiece.
Ron and crew didn’t do it for money, as they could have easily sold it to the biggies in Hollywood for a huge amount. Instead, they sat for years, tailoring the movie to suit our senses and released it themselves.
FINAL AND IMPORTANT POINT!!!
5) Would you believe if I said there are no dialogues?? YES! With zero dialogues, zero narratives and zero translations, Baraka speaks volumes because of its breathtaking cinematography, soulful BGM, achingly beautiful locales, and astonishing vastness and manifold types of people and animals. It is very much like a harmonious virtual tour of the Earth. :)
I am neither promoting this movie, nor trying to implicate social activism, it is just the movie’s simplicity and non-narrative nature that made fall head-over-heels in love with it and share with you all.
Indeed a well spent Sunday afternoon!
*Smirks*
