16/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: Óliver Laxe launches a very high intensity artistic bomb, deeply immersed in the initiatory desert journey of a stupefying blended family

(l-r) Stefania Gadda, Joshua L. Henderson, Richard Bellamy and Sergi Lopez in Sirât

“None of this makes sense. We never should have come. How do we get out of here? Where are we?” In the Quran, the concept that gives its title to Sirât [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the extraordinary film by Óliver Laxe which just sent the competition of the 78th Cannes Film Festival into another dimension, is a bridge suspended over Hell, “thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword”. It’s on its allegorical crossing, in the middle of the Moroccan desert, on a background of the approaching end of the world and to the beat of immersive techno music, that the Spanish filmmaker follows a group of Europeans. These five deserters of society, perpetually searching for rave parties, are joined by a father and his young son who are looking for a missing girl.

“Dad, let’s go, let’s follow them. -They are following us. Are you? It’s not a good idea, you’ll break the car, the roads are very dangerous. -We don’t have a choice.” At the end of an intense rave interrupted by local military declaring a state of emergency, Jade (Jade Oukid), Stef (Stefania Gadda), Josh (Joshua L. Henderson), Tonin (Tonin Janvier) and Bigui (Richard Bellamy) take to their heels with their two small trucks in order to join another party, in the South, near Mauritania. Following their traces closely with his car is Luis (Sergi Lopez), together with Esteban (Bruno Núñez), his son around 10 years old. The man is desperately trying to find his eldest daughter Mar, who has been missing for over five months. Thus begins a crazy journey into completely uninhabited desert and mountain areas…

“The door must be aligned”. Under its epic and dramatic aspects, which are very concrete and drowned in the modern twirling dervish music of Kangding Ray, Sirât offers a vertiginous mystical and metaphysical trip under natural psychotropics. Through the eyes of Luis and his son, once the first obstacles are overcome, another world of more invisible cluse reveals itself, full of peril as extreme emotions rise explosively towards darkness (under a merciless sun). Recycling many genres (a touch of Mad Max, a zest of Zabriskie Point, and the Tawaf ritual at Mecca) and following the subtle thread weaved in his previous works (including Mimosas [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Oliver Laxe
film profile] and Fire Will Come [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Óliver Laxe
film profile]), Óliver Laxe fully carries the spectator away and masterfully succeeds in creating an unforgettable (yet absolutely not experimental) experiential film about man and the world, the collective and the individual, being and nothingness, radicality and universality, the intimate and the cosmic, that is better traversed without thinking in order to enjoy it to the fullest.

Sirât was produced by Spanish outfits Los Desertores Films AIE, Filmes da Ermida, El Deseo (the Almodóvar brothers’s company) and Uri Films, and French outfit 4 A 4 Productions, and co-produced by Movistar Plus+. The Match Factory is handling international sales.

(Translated from French)

Photogallery 15/05/2025: Cannes 2025 - Sirât

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Oliver Laxe, Sergi Lopez, Bruno Nunez, Stefania Gadda, Richard Bellamy, Jade Oukid, Tonin Janvier
© 2025 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it