Baraka a film directed and photographed by Ron Fricke and produced by Mark Magidson (1992)

Easily one of my favorite documentary films, and one that remains in my personal top 10, is Baraka. But it is not a film for the casual viewer when it comes to documentary films. There is no narrator telling you what to think. There is no traditional storyline explaining what you are seeing. Instead, the film requires the viewer to interpret the images and apply meaning to them. And frankly, I think that is where a lot of documentary consumers struggle with a film like this.

You have to participate. You have to derive the deeper meaning of what the filmmaker is saying. And that is exactly what makes Baraka so powerful.

The film moves through three major forces: economic power, religious power, and the power of nature. Those images resonate over and over again, creating visual connections between seemingly unrelated places and cultures. Slowly, the film spirals toward something that could be interpreted as the destruction of the human experience, or perhaps the evolution we are going.

For me, the message is somewhere in the space that humans like to put order to chaos. But too much order creates chaos. So balance is the key to all existence. The loss of balance between the two creates destruction.

You see that battle for balance in the spirit versus organized religion. You see it in the wild jungle of nature versus the development of society. And you see it in the power of money versus the significance of the people who actually create the products that generate that wealth.

Baraka captures all of this visually, creating an emotional story without relying on traditional storytelling.

And that is an incredible filmmaking achievement when you consider what went into making it. Fricke and Magidson took a small crew around the world, shooting on 70mm film across 24 countries and six continents. The production took roughly 30 months, including 14 months of location shooting, and used a custom-built computerized 65mm camera to capture some of the film's remarkable time-lapse photography.

Then there was the business side of actually getting a film like this made and seen. Baraka was produced through Magidson Films and ultimately secured theatrical distribution through The Samuel Goldwyn Company in the United States. Goldwyn planned an initial 70mm release in a handful of major cities before expanding into additional markets.

That matters. Because a film like Baraka is not an easy commercial proposition. There is no star. There is no traditional narrative. There is no voiceover explaining the story. It was shot on an expensive large-format film stock and required audiences to sit with the images and make their own connections.

Yet someone believed enough in the film to give it a theatrical life. And the music is a huge part of why it works. Michael Stearns created the original score, while the soundtrack also incorporates music from artists including Dead Can Dance, L. Subramaniam, Somei Satoh and others. The music doesn't simply sit underneath the images. It becomes part of the storytelling.

There is a reason the film feels almost spiritual at times. The images are telling you something. The music is telling you something. And together they create a feeling that would be almost impossible to communicate through narration.

And this isn't a film that you watch on a small-screen TV with poor audio. This is a film you watch in a theater. You let the images surround you. You let the music become part of the experience. You stop trying to figure out exactly what the filmmaker is telling you and start asking yourself what the images mean to you. That is the difference between watching a documentary and experiencing one.

Baraka is now 34 years old. And somehow, it may be more relevant today than it was when it was released. Technology has changed. The way we consume media has changed. The world has changed. But the tension between nature, religion, humanity, industry, money, and the systems we create to bring order to our lives hasn't gone away.

If anything, Baraka gives us an opportunity to step outside of all of that for 97 minutes and simply look at ourselves. And maybe that is the point. Not to tell us what to think, but to make us think.