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Director and cinematographer Ron Fricke is undoubtedly a master of his craft. Having developed specialized time-lapse camera systems for past documentary projects like Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and after honing his visual and narrative approach with his two previous “nonverbal meditations”, Chronos (1985) and Baraka (1992), Fricke once again takes audiences on a breathtaking visual trip around the planet exploring humanity’s different cultures and practices in a way that shows the power of film as a fine art form. Thoughtful and meticulous, Fricke’s latest work Samsara was filmed in 25 countries and sublimely captures images that will have you finding beauty in the most unlikely of places, from Katrina-ravaged Louisiana to the sulphur miners of Malaysia. Perhaps too philosophical and seemingly pretentious for casual film-goers looking for more of the same, Samsara has no plot and no dialogue but rather an impressive montage of powerful music and images masterfully arranged in a way that is a nonfiction fantasia about humanity.

Like its predecessors, Samsara is a beautifully photographed film which expressed a passionate and contagious infatuation with humanity in all its many forms, as well as concern for its future. In a visual experience such as this, it would be easy to only represent the beautiful and appealing aspects of life on Earth – however achieving a more balanced representation of our world means that the filmmakers have mixed the good with the bad, showing the sublime and the upsetting alongside one another. Baraka shocked us with the mechanized ballet of baby chicks being sorted through the inhumane system of a factory farm, and this tradition continues in Samsara with a similar sequence inside an industrial abattoir which shows the conveyer belt dismemberment of a seemingly endless line of slaughtered pigs.

In the tradition of nonverbal planet-spanning documentaries of which Samsara is part, filmmakers have never claimed objectivity over what is being shown – even if the tone feels like an all-seeing deity wordlessly unravelling the world before us. Certain selections for subject matter, like the factory farms and the abattoir, seem to push a critical agenda and some editing choices reflect the judgements or perspectives of the filmmakers. A particularly strong visual juxtaposition in Samsara begins with the image of a brush delicately hand-panting the facial features of a factory-made latex sex doll followed by a shot of a woman’s face being marked with dotted lines before undergoing cosmetic surgery.

Somewhat similar in effect to David Attenborough’s wildlife documentary series for the BBC, Planet Earth and Life, the breathtaking cinematography in Samsara documents places and people in ways that are literally beyond words. Some images in the film seem dreamlike in their surrealism, like shots of the a house’s second floor filled with windswept sand like that from the most remote desert. One of the most memorable sequences from Baraka is of a traditional Kecak dance ritual (which you may have seen a blacklight 3D version of in James Cameron’s Avatar) and traditional movement and modern ritualization continue as a theme in Samsara. The scope of film includes traditional dance ceremonies from south Asia as well as more modern versions physical expression, including an amazingly visceral performance art piece by Olivier de Sagazan (which you currently can see on Ron Fricke’s Facebook page). Another movement-based sequence of Samsara jubilantly documents the absurdity of existence with the most gloriously photographed images of that now familiar internet sensation; formation dancing performed by some very dedicated Pilipino prison inmates. Very few films can effectively relate the emotional impact of both centuries-old spiritual ceremonies as well as scenes of today’s abject consumerism, but that is why Samsara is category all its own.