“Watching Baraka, a nonverbal symphony of exquisite images, you experience a feeling of intense empowerment. As one spectacular image follows another, nearly every one lucid and sharp and magnificent, you feel as if you can go anywhere and see anything.
“Shot in 24 countries on six continents over a stretch of 14 months, this completely wordless, plotless film by director Ron Fricke fulfills the "magic carpet" promise of the movies to a previously unimagined degree. Floating high in the air, you peer over the edge of a gurgling volcano in Hawaii, then sweep down to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, or Ryoan-Ji temple in Kyoto, or Lake Natron in Tanzania, or the fire plains of Kuwait, their oil fires burning like the eternal flames of the dead.
“'Baraka' is a Sufi word that means essence or breath or, most commonly, blessing. And that's what this stunning, unimaginably beautiful film is -- a blessing.
“The film allows us to see the actual interconnectedness of all things in the world, and to appreciate its patterns and symmetries and its innate sense of balance and proportion. Fricke has said that Baraka was intended to be "a journey of rediscovery that plunges into nature, into history, into the human spirit and finally into the realm of the infinite." And miraculously, his bold intentions were realized. See this movie and see it in a theater; this one can't wait for video.” - Washington Post, 1993
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