Fricke and his crew traveled to twenty-four countries across six continents to make a film without a single line of dialogue, a single interview, or a single narrator’s voice to tell you what any of it meant.

BARAKA (1992) is Ron Fricke’s answer to the question of what a documentary can be without words. Monasteries in Nepal, oil wells burning in Kuwait after the Gulf War, cigarette rollers in Indonesia, tribal ceremonies in Africa, the ruins of Auschwitz. Fricke arranges it all into a single unbroken procession, cut together with time-lapse clouds and crowds sped into rivers of motion.

Fricke had shot Koyaanisqatsi a decade earlier, then directed the wordless IMAX film Chronos, and here he pushed the approach further. He shot in 65mm with a Todd-AO camera and printed on 70mm stock. The production spanned 152 locations and fourteen months of travel. The title is a word found in several languages meaning blessing, or the breath of life.

There is no plot, no characters, no argument stated in language. The film asks you to sit with the fact that a Balinese dancer, a Tokyo commuter, and a child scavenging in a garbage dump all exist on the same planet at the same time, and simply lets the images make the case for what that means.