A father dies, the family prepares the deceased for the next life. The simplicity of the premise of Tenzin Phuntsog’s narrative feature debut, Next Life, at once justifies its austere tone and atmosphere and belies its complex and sensuous spirituality. The dialectical nature of Phuntsog’s point of view allows contradictions and ironies to take precedence over character development and narrative logic, and suggest a bridge between life and death that is, perhaps, not one-way.
The first image we see in Next Life is of a collection of items in a small nook in a suburban Northern California home: family photos, a portrait of the Dalai Lama, and a carved skull statue. Religion, just like American prosperity, is leaden with symbolism; in Buddhism the skull encourages detachment from the physical self, reminds practitioners of mortality and impermanence, represents the destruction of ego. The scene that follows is indicative, then, of Phuntsog’s preoccupation with contradictions. Pala (Tsewang Migyur Khangsar) has fallen ill; vague pains in his heart that spread throughout his body, dreams of his childhood in Tibet. His wife Amala (Tseyki Dolma) and son Rigzin (Rigzin Phurpatsang) sit in the background, blurred and detached, while a Tibetan doctor listens to the heavy, earthen thuds of Pala’s pulse, and provides a solemn reading: he doesn’t have long to live.
Depending on your own sensitivity to contradiction and irony, close attention to the body is either in harmony with spiritual transcendence or in conflict with it. So, too, does a conspicuous emphasis on technology in Next Life both facilitate emotional and spiritual connections to the family’s homeland and draw attention to their physical isolation. With subject matter as ritualistic as Buddhism at its center, seeing karaoke night represented as crucial a tie to one’s homeland as prayer, or a VR headset (literally and symbolically perched on the wearer’s skull) as providing the same healing respite from the world as a real walk in nature, is profoundly complicated.
Aspects of Pala, Amala, and Rigzin’s isolation are, indeed, involuntary. Who can blame Pala, an American citizen, for admitting that he’s never felt like an American? Rigzin’s efforts, in English and Chinese, to secure his father a visa to travel to Tibet are unsuccessful; his calls to the Chinese Consulate are rarely put through to a human being in the first place, a cruel, impersonal layer between one life and another. One also wonders how welcoming the surrounding neighborhood has been to his family. The viewer will never know; any trace of life within the immaculate rows of manicured lawns and cookie cutter homes is gone, but for a smattering of SUVs clinging to sloped driveways, these lumbering symbols of prosperity pointed upwards to even bigger ones.
At the doctor’s request, Pala and his family spend time in nature. A lone tree perched on a grassy hill becomes a place of peaceful refuge and reflection, as does a small patch of woodland where at any moment it seems as if someone could walk behind a tree and never reappear. Rigzin cares for his father in his dying days and mourns him in the days after. Gentle baths, cooked meals, calls to the consulate and distant relatives, and a private conversation between the living and the dead all take on literal significance.
Maybe the tears he sheds on the hillside mean some ego is necessary after death, lest the grief gnaw away at you from within. He meets with a Lama who explains the four stages of life on earth, each one more painful than the last. Rigzin doesn’t experience a religious breakthrough, but perhaps he’s not in need of one. He’s searching, in some way – when he dons the VR headset like his father did before and wanders around the meadow on the Tibetan mountainside – searching for whatever it is his father remembered, and perhaps now sees again.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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