Baraka is an award winning, poetic documentary which travels around the earth with stunning visual clarity.

From the Himalayan Mountains to Brazilian favelas to the Egyptian pyramids, Baracka captures our world to lengths that we may never see with our own eyes. Baracka starts in the overwhelming mountainous range of the Himalayas, we glide over and around the peaks leading up to the scene of red faced monkey bathing off the coast of Japan. The monkey rejects all interaction with the camera, he looks right, left, down but refuses all intimacy with us. The scene then jump cuts from the monkey to stars and then quickly back to the monkey, this infers that the monkey is actually thinking about the world that it lives in. This is one of countless juxtaposing scenes in Baraka. The fact that the animal chosen is a monkey, which humans derive from, is also selected for a symbolic, deeper meaning. Baraka hasnt been created for the subjective human but the objective. The poetic documentary is expressive and artistic, it isnt forcing you to think in a certain way, with a certain attitude but it solely wants you to think. It can be interpreted however you want it to be, a convention of these documentaries, it stirs up moods impelling us to crave for the meaning which is when the audience becomes active and begins to question what the purpose is. Baraka fulfils the need for its audience to be taken out their everyday surroundings, to escape from their own life and see things that they may only be able to dream about. We our shown a waterfall a fully natural process of erosion, spectacular and breath-taking, this simple clip shows how beautiful the natural earth is. Then we witness deforestation, trees being brought to the ground by humans. These two clips show a clear contrast and makes us wonder what would the earth look or be like if we werent here to disrupt and affect it. Later into the documentary we see heaps of chicks being put through funnels and falling through hatchets, their lives are clearly being dictated by us as we see them firstly as eggs. The scene then cuts to an overcrowded train, the train acts and is portrayed in a similar way to the funnel, being picked up from one place and then to the next station, it provokes the idea that like the chicks are we being controlled and dictated through our life by a presence greater than ourselves. Baraka ends with a time lapse of day quickly becoming night and night quickly becoming day in a continuous cycle. The camera focuses on one sight while time lapses creating an eerie situation as we are so used to seeing things on the ground move quickly while the sky changes ponderously. Assumedly all greater beings live off earth so it unearths this frequent feeling of a numinous. Baraka is extremely successful in its aim to make its audience think; the seamless documentary not only puts us in the place of the camera but takes it a step further by questioning the audience. It shows the world we inhabit is beyond what many of us imagined, it is truly beyond words and beyond humans, it leaves us yearning for answers.