NEXT LIFE

A slow-moving, delicately paced gem of a film. A Buddhist family, long exiled to California, must make preparations for the father’s journey to the next life as he slowly dies. The religious practices and customs—and the visiting monks—provide both contrast and a strange harmony for the very middle-class American lifestyle the family has come to inhabit. The family’s desire to return to Tibet seems in many ways unachievable, so they root themselves in Buddhist teachings about death and rebirth, finding solace in the belief that in his next life he will be reborn as a bird in Tibet. ~SM