Baraka is a breathtaking journey through 24 countries across 6 continents, painstakingly shot on Todd AO-70mm film by filmmakers Ron Fricke and Mark Madgison. It has no plot, no actors and no script; instead, it unfolds a spellbinding collection of rich, high-quality images stitched together with compelling cinematography an original score by Michael Stearns.

The films I’m making are nonverbal, there’s no main characters in them. The main characters are locations and the essence that comes out of those images.” ~ Ron Fricke

The word baraka comes from the Sufi language of the Middle East and means, in the broadest possible terms, a blessing.

This is not a documentary or a travelogue, it’s really not. It’s really meant to be a moving emotional experience about life on the planet and each of our place here, and not about where is this or where is that.” ~ Ron Fricke

You can catch a full, though tragically low-quality, stream of the film on Google Video, but we highly recommend the fantstic 2-disc special edition, available on both DVD and Blu-ray, which — we don’t need to tell you — packs the right ratio of obscurity, originality and visual artistry to make a superb holiday gift for the film, photography or travel geek in your life.

via @panopticon76