The first thing you notice is the weight of the air—that thick, mineral density of a desert night where sound travels differently, where every beat lands dans le corps like a prophecy. In Oliver Laxe‘s Sirāt, the rave is not a backdrop but a threshold: speakers stacked against Moroccan cliffs, bodies moving through delirium, a father and son winding through the crowd with a dog at their heels, searching for a daughter who has vanished into the pulse. This is how Laxe initiates us—not with exposition, but with atmosphere as palpable as sweat on skin, a kind of mise-en-scène that breathes before it explains.
I met Laxe in New York, in the quiet aftermath of Neon’s acquisition of his fourth feature—a film that arrived at Cannes like a sandstorm, shared the Jury Prize, claimed the Soundtrack Award for composer Kangding Ray, and was crowned best film by IndieWire’s critics poll. It has since gathered $9 million across France, Spain, and four other territories. Now, on November 14, it begins its American pilgrimage in New York and Los Angeles, one of five international titles Neon is steering toward the Oscars. But to speak of Sirāt in terms of awards feels almost profane. As Laxe himself insists, the film is a medicine—and medicines are not measured in gold.
Oliver Laxe’s Ontology: Images That Breathe
Laxe speaks of cinema as a geometry of the unconscious. “If a film connects,” he tells me, his voice measured as a monk’s, “it is because my images retain a spiritual proportion. They are not yet dead.” This is the crux of his sorcery: images that refuse domestication. While contemporary cinema piles meaning upon meaning until the frame buckles, Laxe practices restraint. He stops before the image collapses under its own weight—an art he credits to David Lynch, who knew how to preserve the raw metabolism of fear, desire, and nightmare. “I’m making sorcery like him,” Laxe says, and you believe him, because Sirāt moves like a spell cast in broad daylight.
The film operates in three dimensions, each layered like strata in the Moroccan landscape. The first is physical: a hazardous road movie through North Africa’s mountains and eroded plains. Laxe studied The Wages of Fear and Sorcerer while preparing, yet the reference points expand—he jokes they were filming Mad Max Zero, a pre-apocalypse where the war remains a distant rumor rather than a visual spectacle. But Sirāt is not content with mere survivalism. It dialogues with Mad Max while resisting its nihilism; here, the desert is not an arena for catharsis but a space for questionnement.
The Existential Layer
The second dimension is existential, and here Laxe’s influences reveal a map of longing. He cites American cinema of the 1970s—Vanishing Point, Two Lane Blacktop, Apocalypse Now, Easy Rider—films that “we don’t know what they are about, but they express the angst of their decade.” This is crucial: Sirāt is not a film about something, but a film that is something. It vibrates with the energy of our own fractured moment—climate anxiety, algorithmic alienation, the search for meaning in a world that offers only echoes. The characters are not developed in the conventional sense; they are felt through gesture, silence, scars. “People watch too many series,” Laxe observes. “They are used to plots being developed. But I don’t need this. My images say things. You feel their soul—what else do you want?”
This is the quiet revolution at the heart of Sirāt: it trusts the audience to perceive without being led. When Sergi López’s father figure maneuvers through the caravan of nomadic ravers, when the group confronts obstacles that test their fragile solidarity, we understand not because of dialogue but because of the body’s language—the way a hand grips a steering wheel, the way eyes scan a horizon that offers no shelter.
The Metaphysical Desert of Sirāt
The third dimension is metaphysical, and here Tarkovsky rises like a spirit over the dunes. Stalker and Nostalgia are not influences so much as coordinates. Laxe’s Morocco—where he lived for more than a decade—is an existentialist landscape. “In the mountain, we feel we are nothing,” he explains. “We go to the desert, an abstract space where human beings cannot hide. We must look inside.” This is the pilgrimage of Sirāt: from the external search for a missing girl to the internal revelation that the desert strips bare. The film’s Super 16mm cinematography is not nostalgia but chemistry—alchemy, even. “There is imperfection,” Laxe says. “Art is about mistakes.”
The grain is visible, alive. It breathes like celluloid should, capturing the violence of erosion—wind, snow, time itself scoring the landscape. After digitization, something is always lost; but in those initial captures, the image penetrates the metabolism differently. It remembers the way we remember: incomplete, textured, haunted.
The Sound of Seeing
If the image is Laxe’s first language, sound is his second. He discovered himself as a musician while making Sirāt, collaborating with Kangding Ray for eighteen months before shooting began. Most films score after the fact; Laxe built the sound landscape first, then shot to its rhythm. “We watched the sound and heard the image,” he says. This inversion explains the film’s sensorial immediacy: the rave sequences throb with a tactility that is almost violent, the bass becoming a geological force, the cliffs resonating like a cathedral built for ecstasy.
The result is a synesthetic experience. When the caravan climbs into more precarious terrain, the sound design mirrors the physical struggle—every engine strain, every footstep on loose scree, every inhalation of dry air is weighted. This is cinema as corps-à-corps, a wrestling match between the human and the elemental.
The Wound of the World
Laxe’s casting deepens the film’s authenticity. Richard Bellamy, a poet and friend of fifteen years, appears as Bigui—having lost his hand three years before filming. Laxe hesitated: another character already had no legs, and he feared the intention would show too clearly. But he surrendered to life’s logic. “It’s a film about the wound,” he says, “about the pain of war today.” The scars are not metaphorical but literal, etched on bodies that have endured the world’s vicissitudes. These non-actors bring a presence that cannot be rehearsed; they are not playing roles but manifesting being.
This refusal to hide the proof of the crime is what makes Sirāt feel so urgent. Laxe doesn’t aestheticize suffering; he lets it radiate from the frame’s edges. The dog, the father, the caravan—all move through the landscape as if the landscape itself is a participant, a manifestation of what Laxe calls “creative intelligence,” or God. He likes being tested by nature, surrendering to its limits. “Life doesn’t give you what you are looking for,” he says. “It gives you what you need.” Filmmaking, then, becomes a practice of frustration and revelation, a risky act of faith.
The Train of the Future
The film ends with a train crossing the desert, carrying refugees of every region and race. “This train is the future,” Laxe says. “We will go on the same train; we will be pushed.” It is an image of forced migration, climate catastrophe, technological upheaval—yet Laxe insists on hope. The only redemption is that life will oblige us to change, to ask: “What is it to be human?” His answer: more human.
This is the paradox of Sirāt: it is a film about oblivion that leaves you with a strange clarity, a medicine that doesn’t taste good but heals. It is sorcery made from light, grain, and the unspoken geometry of the soul.
Sirāt: The Unfolding Layers
The Grain as Gospel
Super 16mm chemistry transforms the Moroccan desert into a living archive, where imperfection becomes the only honest testimony.
Sound Before Sight
Eighteen months of collaboration with Kangding Ray inverted the production process—music became the map, not the echo.
Three Dimensions of Being
Physical (Mad Max), existential (1970s American angst), and metaphysical (Tarkovsky)—each layer penetrates without overwhelming.
The Wound Made Visible
Casting friends with real scars refuses melodrama; it insists that cinema can hold the body’s truth without commentary.
Lynch’s Unconscious, Tarkovsky’s Sky
Laxe inherits Lynch’s sorcery—keeping nightmares raw, undomesticated—and Tarkovsky’s spiritual geometry, where the sky becomes a question the earth cannot answer.
FAQ
Why does Sirāt feel incomplete in a satisfying way?
Because Laxe hides the proof of the crime—he shows the wound but not the weapon, letting silence and gesture carry the narrative weight.
What makes the desert setting more than a backdrop?
It is an existential mirror: the mountains ask “Who am I?”; the desert answers “You cannot hide.”
How does the film resist modern cinematic bloat?
By stopping before the image dies. Laxe’s images remain alive, undomesticated, refusing to explain themselves into oblivion.
Can a film be both a medicine and a spectacle?
Sirāt suggests yes—though the spectacle is not visual bombast but the slow, difficult revelation of what we cannot face.
Why does Super 16mm matter here?
The alchemy of celluloid captures erosion, violence, and time itself in a way digital cannot—imperfection as the texture of truth.
The desert’s weight is already circulating in Neon’s trailer—Sirat US Trailer: Cannes Winner Hits Theaters—where two minutes of Super 16mm grain reveal what the images refuse to explain.
