This article appeared in the May 21, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Sirât (Oliver Laxe, 2025)

Oliver Laxe’s fourth feature, Sirât, is the French-born Galician director’s first film to premiere in Competition at Cannes, where it’s been a highlight of the 2025 festival’s first week. A singular work that calls upon cinema’s ability to arouse and engulf the senses, the film is an elemental and emotional piece of moviemaking from an artist known to draw on the full range of the medium’s metaphysical powers. Named after the razor-thin bridge that, in Islamic culture, is said to pass over hell en route to paradise, Sirât is set in the appropriately purgatorial expanse of Morocco’s Sahara Desert, where a Spanish father (Sergi López) and his young son (Bruno Núñez) search for the boy’s missing sister, who may have taken up with a traveling group of ravers.

As the film opens, roving free-party enthusiasts are stacking giant speakers toward the sky in anticipation of the day’s drug-fueled dance festivities, which Laxe and celebrated Spanish cinematographer Mauro Herce capture on 16mm in extended scenes of trance-inducing techno and unbridled bacchanalia. When a rumor arises that the girl may be attending an upcoming rave, the father and son join the group’s caravan of retrofitted camper vans, which is interrupted first by a military ambush and soon after by an unspeakable tragedy that abruptly shifts the story’s tone and trajectory. As the dangers and dark undercurrents of the rave lifestyle intensify, so too does the film’s sense of impending apocalypse. If the movie looks something like an art-house spin on a Mad Max film, its road-trip-to-the-abyss conceit more closely resembles The Wages of Fear (1953), moving subtly from images of blissed-out dancers with missing limbs to radio transmissions about war and geopolitical tension to a literal minefield. With its simultaneous sense of the primal and the ecstatic, Sirât touches a nerve too rarely struck by cinema—one in which the body and soul unite with holistic force.

I sat down with Laxe a couple of days after the premiere to discuss the movie’s unique rhythms and the possibility of transcending one’s ego through filmmaking.

Maybe we can start with the film’s title, and specifically how Islamic ideas and traditions have increasingly influenced your filmmaking.

Obviously, my faith has a strong relation to the way I make films. As I understand life through my faith, there is always a net. Thanks to this, I have the opportunity to make these temerarious films, whether it’s shooting real fires [in 2019’s Fire Will Come], or, as in this film, traveling with a bunch of people to the desert. I try not to calculate my filmmaking practice, or allow my filmmaking decisions to be determined by my ego. My practice allows me to transcend my ego.

I’m expressing the way I see life with this film. The literal meaning of sirât is “the path.” Life is a path that has turns; it has alleys on both sides. Life shakes you; it doesn’t knock at the door. It appears, suddenly shakes you, and asks, “Who are you?”

How familiar were you with rave culture before making the film? 

I’m the son of workers, and as a result, I have a lot of rage inside me. I need to transfer my energy, you know? And I like to dance; I need to dance.

One of the inspirations for the film came from Nietzsche: “I would believe only in a god who could dance.” And the other is from Rumi: “Dance as if nobody is watching you.”

Did you begin conceiving the film around the idea of dance culture, or did it start with the father-son story?

We started with trucks crossing the desert. That was the image I had in my head. In 2011, I wrote a treatment about a kind of crazy truck race. Do you know the cartoon Los autos locos [Wacky Races (1968-69)]? I even did casting for it, with really freaky people in Morocco. It was a crazy project. But I really wanted to make a film with trucks. When I was making Mimosas (2016), I was living in a pine grove, and a rave was organized there. It was during this time that I reconnected with rave culture, and started going to raves again. So I started to write a script about dancing, and these images started to develop with the music.

I feel the film is a reflection of the dialectic of myself. I am a man of tradition. I follow the Quran. I get drunk on the Quran. It’s really healthy for me. But at the same time, I like techno. So in this film I’m expressing the sensitivity of a human being in the last days of humanity—trying to trust in himself and having the tools, but also having too much ego to do it. I start from the basis that we—all of us—are broken. Ravers know this. In the end, this is a community of mutilated people, and this guy, this outsider, will touch the bottom of himself.

Other than Sergi López, are all the actors in the film nonprofessionals?

Yes.

How did you find them? 

I was in a relationship with Nadia Acimi for five years, and she is a raver. She is also the costume designer for all my films, and she did some of the casting for this film. She was the bridge to all the rave crews we worked with to organize the parties. We wanted to connect with the most pure collective we could find. And this group in the film believes they are preserving the techno-traveler rave culture of Europe; they are the kids of this British collective that left Britain at the end of the ’80s. They have this radical coherence. I really wanted to detach the film from this decadent interpretation of the punk movement, like Burning Man and all these celebrations of ego, where people think they are something that they are not. It’s neurosis. We are celebrating. It’s not about posing. We are ugly. “Dance as if nobody’s watching you.”

They were comfortable with you filming them? 

Reality has to give you its permission. You have to deserve it. You really have to prove to reality that your intention is noble. Some of the people we worked with on the rave scenes were here in Cannes for the premiere, and they gave me the best, most touching feedback. Because we’re talking about their lives out there. They really felt represented for the first time. For me, as a filmmaker in Cannes, that’s the Palme d’Or: the fact that I really connected with them. I’m happy the film is being understood—or felt.

Were there any particular difficulties for you and Mauro Herce shooting on 16mm in the desert, capturing what you wanted to as far as the dance sequences and the driving scenes?  

During the shoot, the whole team told me, “Man, we don’t need to go so fast with the trucks. The impression of speed—you can have it if you go slow.” But I didn’t know. I said, “I don’t believe you. I’m sorry. We have to hit the gas.” So we had a lot of problems with the lenses, because the way we were shooting into the trucks was really difficult. The lenses broke and we had to repeat a few sequences. We lost some days of shooting because of that. And there were some sandstorms that were tough on the equipment.

Can you tell me a little about working with [techno producer] Kangding Ray on the music? How did you describe what you wanted to hear, or feel, in the music?

Just like I did with my co-writer, Santiago Fillol, I went really far with Kangding Ray—all thanks to him. It was really good to have a dialogue with another artist. He can produce techno tracks, but he’s also able to create a more esoteric and ethereal kind of ambient music.

We exchanged tracks, and we found that we referenced a lot of similar musicians. In the end, for me, image is sound. I’m a filmmaker of images. I like to work with the sensuality of an image. I’m not a good storyteller. I’m not a good actor. But I know how to coordinate two images. So the purpose was to build this kind of musical auditory landscape—to make sure the noise of the film was linked to the distorted noise of the music, in as natural and organic a way as possible.

The film seems to have a few obvious influences—Sorcerer (1977), the Mad Max films—but in the press notes you only mention one film, Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997), in relation to the way Kiarostami deals with death. I found that interesting. 

I studied audiovisual communication at university, and during that time I discovered a lot of filmmakers. But when I moved to Morocco, I said, “Okay, that’s enough. I found my masters.” I would say: “In the name of the father, Bresson (the mind), the son, Kiarostami (the heart), and the holy spirit, Tarkovsky (the soul).” So I had my three masters, and each one has helped me in different dimensions.

As for other influences—look, I’m a European filmmaker. The film was made with a European sensitivity, and with a European budget, but it deals with contentious emotions, in an almost American way. I like American cinema from the ’70s. It was a time when studios were helping filmmakers. Something was up. Society was really polarized, like nowadays, with a lot of violence. But spirituality was also making a comeback in the form of the New Age movement. Then we have Apocalypse Now (1979), Easy Rider (1969), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). It was a cinema that really connected with its time. That’s what we wanted to do with Sirât: to make a film that expresses something from our time—something about now, that has the energy of this moment. It’s a jump into the abyss, a celebration of the end. It’s the end of the world, but keep dancing. You could be screaming, crying, but, as a raver always says, keep dancing.

Jordan Cronk is a film critic and the founder of the Acropolis Cinema screening series. He’s a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and a program consultant for the Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes.