Oliver Laxe at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, 2025.Chris Pizzello/The Associated Press
The title of Oliver Laxe’s fourth feature Sirat refers, in Islam, to the pathway that souls must traverse to reach paradise. This precarious bridge, as thin as a hair and as sharp as a sword, also crosses over the entrance to hell.
Perched on this knife-edge between the pit and the promised land, Laxe’s film follows a scrappy convoy of desert-dwelling ravers on a treacherous trail through the merciless Moroccan landscape. They’re accompanied by Luis (Sergi López), who’s searching for his runaway daughter Marina, with his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) and loyal canine Pipa in tow.
Sirat explores the tension between humanity and the natural world
The Galician director, whose film won the Cannes Jury Prize last year and has since been nominated for Best International Feature at this year’s Academy Awards, described the setting as an environment replete with transcendent qualities, offering more immediate access to the sublime. “When you’re in the desert you can’t distract yourself, you are obliged to look to the sky … it tells us that we are nothing, that we are small,” he said in an interview during the Toronto International Film Festival last fall.
Sirat drops us into its pulsating, sun-stroked milieu as Luis and Esteban navigate crowds of thrashing bodies, eventually crossing paths with a kind-hearted gaggle of world-weary veteran partiers. The aging outsiders are initially reluctant to take these fish out of water with them to the next rave – where they all suspect Luis’s daughter might be – but the group grows gradually closer throughout their arid and arduous road trip.
Esteban’s kindness and sensitivity, evidenced by his tendency to share their limited food supply with the others, open Luis to the importance of communal care. This generosity is reciprocated by the group, who pitch in to help the duo’s sedan chug through all manner of choppy terrains.
The film’s central tension between humanity and the natural world is expressed through high-velocity imagery of the characters’ vehicles grappling with the desert landscape. More than a mere compositional coup, this consistent yet unstable sense of place is essential to the film’s mythical sweep. “I don’t shoot my films in nature because it’s a beautiful frame, I shoot in nature because nature is saying things,” Laxe said. “It’s pushing you to your limits, it’s testing you. It’s the best place to evoke that life has rules.”
Oliver Laxe says he made Sirat like it was his last film.Quim Vives/Supplied
These extremities become apparent at the plot’s approximate midpoint, when a terrible loss occurs so suddenly that neither the characters nor the audience have time to think. The film’s terse atmosphere and unhurried pace have already been subtly working on our nerves, and this violent shock confirms the sense of magisterial dread that underscored Sirat’s most tender moments in its first half.
The group is beset with further calamity when a techno-tinged, psychotropic grieving circle takes a shocking turn. This conclusion ends with certain characters taking a leap of faith to escape danger, walking through a site of peril with their eyes closed, surrendering to something beyond themselves.
There’s an optimism to be gleaned from all this bloodshed, and it’s not surprising that Laxe considers pessimism the province of youth. “When you’re young, you’re more so moved by nihilism … you’re against everything. You’re lost and you tend toward self-destruction,” he said. “But slowly, through the raves, through the parties, through the music, you connect more with your fragility and your vulnerability. You connect with yourself, you grow, mature, find balance.”
The ravers we’re acquainted with in the film are in various stages of middle-age; they look tired and some of them have lost limbs through the years. The 43-year-old filmmaker notes that the characters are close to his own age, saying that “when you do a film, you are looking for mirrors, for something that reflects yourself as a filmmaker.”
It was crucial to Laxe to push his characters to their limits by introducing death to the narrative. “We needed something strong in the middle of the film, we needed tocar fondo,” Laxe said, referencing the Spanish idiom for rock-bottom. He then offered a more literal translation: “to touch the deep.” Laxe said doing so allows us to better understand things and change. “When life slaps you in the face, you get humbled. This is the real freedom: when you accept that you are not free.”
The film’s central tension is between humanity and the natural world.Courtesy of NEON
The film ends at a point of uncertainty for the surviving figures, who once again find themselves hurtling through the desert in turbulent locomotion. But perhaps these characters are headed for better days. “Life doesn’t give you what you’re looking for, it gives you what you need. It all depends on your interpretation. There are people who think that we are cosmic rubbish lost in the universe, but I don’t agree,” Laxe said. “Life expresses itself with crisis and tragedy but there is a gift behind everything; there is always something to learn.”
One of the film’s final shots finds the camera creeping into the mouth of a speaker. For Laxe, this physical instrument consolidates the mystic qualities that the filmmaker is engaged with. “My goal as an artist is to push through this mystery, one that’s expressed in a dusty old box,” he said, tapping the faded black crate tucked next to his chair as a side table. “What comes from there is subtle,” he maintains, “the material world has a spiritual world beneath.”
Reflecting on the taxations and uncertainties of filming Sirat, Laxe claims that he made this film like it was his last. Mirroring his characters once more, he said: “You always have fears, but you jump.”