For You, Lord, For You

For You, Lord, For You is a film that literally moves through us, leaving our bodies and minds forever transformed in the aftermath of the journey, with the sense of having accessed other dimensions, other worlds.

From film to film, Dupire & Kuentz have skillfully developed an extrasensory cinematic approach, offering us true ethnographic immersions through feeling. Here, a fascinating dive into the culture and spirituality of the Kalbeliyas, a nomadic people of Rajasthan.

“We gypsies always move, and ghosts also,” an elder reveals just before our immersion in the heart of the festivities begins. The film acts as a vector for these movements, making palpable this intertwining of visible and invisible vibrations, where bodies become both receptacles and echoes of the spirits and memories that have inhabited this community. It speaks of unspoken truths, destiny, mourning, and miraculous rebirth in an expressive framework where internal conflicts seem to finally find a path forward. Without attempting to explain — for we would quickly reach the limits of language — the filmmakers allow us to experience over time the mystical atmosphere of this open-air huis clos, where trance states follow one another, as mysterious as they are revealing of the sufferings and hopes of this people.

Cinema here becomes an invitation to live a new experience that reconnects us to the world, opening cracks that allow new understandings of life to settle within us. And this is where the greatness of the film lies: in its ability to make the invisible tangible, to reveal without stating, to suspend us for a moment and let us be crossed by otherness. An experience that, like a ritual, cannot be explained, but must instead be lived, in total surrender to the forces that surround and bind us, beyond the visible.

Jason Burnham
Tënk editorial manager