TENZEN PHUNTSOG: NEXT LIFE (2025) - NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2026

Travelling light: death in another country

The estrangement of diaspora is felt strongly in this film by Tibetan-born director Tenzen Phuntsog about an older man, known simply as Pala, father (Tsewang Migyur Khangsar), his wife, known as Amala, mother (Tseyki Dolma), and their strapping young son Rigzin (Rigzin Phurpatsang), the main character really, because it is he who suffers the most visibly at the loss of his father but also at the privations of Tibetans whose desire to return home is frustrated by Chinese bureaucrats as the father takes ill and dies in California.

The other important player is that suburban California, for the little family lives in a generic suburban California house, with the director shooting in stripped-down form the house where his own parents live. Director Phuntsog is into landscape, as seen in his shorts, particularly "Pure Land," where Tibetans photograph the sparse terrains of the ancestral Blackfeet Tribe in Montana in an effort to evoke their Tibetan homeland. Here also the son, freshly grieving, takes refuge in the hills of California, but he falls down there weeping. In the film's most painful moment, someone close calls him when he is driving back and he has to tell her his father has died and she weeps while he suffers inwardly.

Two Tibetan monks have come to the suburban house to perform a ritual in their loud guttural chant. It is surprising, even impressive, that young Rigzin, who must be assimilated to American life in many ways, feels such a deep commitment to Tibetan culture and religion and practices the Tibetan Buddhist rituals along with his mother.

Before he dies, the father is seen by a traditional Tibetan doctor, who informs him that the pain he feels in his heart and through his body goes back to some experience in the homeland and is very bad. The doctor listens to the father's heartbeat, but hears more than a western doctor would, roots of earlier trauma. The director makes use of expressive sound here, so that the blood rushing through the ill father's veins "rumbles like a river running beneath the earth, the sound filling the empty room," as is described in a Filmmaker Magazine article and interview with the filmaker, who did most of the work in shooting, editing, and producing this film. The result is a cinema of minimalism, of ritual, slow cinema, and a cry of the displaced in an America that has everything but what the soul craves.

Phuntsog was born in India but studied in the US including at Columbia, describes working extensively in film preservation seeking to salvage the films of his native country, then deciding he must make his own films, and loving to work with film rather than digital and even 35mm. This film however was shot in a very spare manner, both to the content and lack of external context, and the way the house, his own parent's house (and the mother played by his own mother), is stripped down to be generic, which he felt would make it communicate to viewers in a more universal manner. He does not consider the fact of all fiction, that specificity adds relatability because of the way that details draw us in. However "super lean," the phrase he uses in the interview, is his style and there may be a link between austerity, Buddhist ritual,, and grief that he is discovering in his work and will reveal themselves more vividly in the future. The sponsorship of Carlos Reygadas as a producer is a testament to his authenticity and commitment. The New Directors/New Films series often presents us with filmmakers on the edge, in the process of just about to come into full being, as here.

Next Life, 73 mins., was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films. Showtimes:
Mon, April 13 - 8:15 PM Walter Reade Theater
Q&A with Tenzen Phuntsog
Tue, April 14 - 6:00 PM MoMA
Q&A with Tenzen Phuntsog

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.