Forest of Bliss, by the American anthropologist and pioneering ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner, is a mesmerizing presentation of life, or rather death, in Benares, India. Gardner describes the film as less a compression of his most recent ten weeks in that city, than “a ninety-minute expansion on a split second of the panic dread I felt on turning an unfamiliar corner onto Manikarnika Ghat (The Great Cremation Ground)” during an unsettling visit ten years earlier. Appearing to occupy the time between two sunrises, the film revolves around three inhabitants of this world of death: a healer, a priest, and the hereditary “king” of the cremation ground who sells sacred fire to mourners. Interwoven with their activities are glimpses of the lives of other denizens of the Ghat: wild dogs, marigold sellers, boys flying kites, wood-carriers, boatmen on the Ganges. In keeping with the emotional experience that inspired him, Gardner dispenses with distracting voice-over narration and subtitles, relying on a flow of images of often astonishing beauty to evoke a sense of how the people of Benares deal with death's pervasive presence.