The 8th edition of Tunisia’s Gabès Cinema Fen (running 26 April-2 May) offered up a full retrospective of Oliver Laxe’s works, including the Cannes-awarded and Oscar-nominated work Sirāt, as well as a masterclass moderated by Tunisian film critic and historian Tahar Chikhaoui.

Laxe described his filmmaking path as a series of reactions to a feeling of not quite belonging, which has persisted since his childhood. He was born in Paris to Spanish parents who moved back to Spain when Laxe was 6. “In France, we were Spaniards. When we went back to Spain, we were French,” he explained, recalling an early sense of “inadaptation” that would later shape both his life and his work. “When people took pictures of me, I never looked at the camera.” This distance - from place, from identity, from fixed definitions - became a driving force for him to move forwards, both literally and symbolically.

His path into film didn’t follow institutional routes. Rejecting film school, he studied communications, until an unexpected turn in the road led him to Morocco, where he’s made all of his films to date. Despite securing a scholarship in London, he described feeling “very bad… a real emptiness.” Morocco, by contrast, is a place where he felt “slightly at home,” allowing his body - and by extension, his filmography - to “express itself.”

During his masterclass, Laxe mentioned the filmmakers who’d influenced him the most in these early days. “I used to make a joke: when I left for London, that would have been it, I would have completed the trinity. In the name of the Father - the head, Robert Bresson - the Son - the heart, Abbas Kiarostami - and of the Holy Spirit - Andrei Tarkovsky. Amen.” He quoted Mirror, Stalker and Andrei Rublev as his favourite Tarkovsky films. His attraction to Eastern philosophies and filmmakers like Kiarostami originates in a search for meaning which is absent from his own cultural context. “It’s essential that we find a spiritual lineage,” he argued.

Laxe is also one of those directors who constantly question their artistic intentions. The first years he spent in Morocco were “a complicated time, because I’m not Moroccan; I wasn’t Muslim either. The position you speak from is very important - where you look from, how you look.”  Discussing Sirāt, the filmmaker stressed that “it was a very difficult film to make, I suffered a lot from a fear of being misunderstood. I was afraid people would think I was a sadist or a cruel person”, and he shed light on his intention to kill off the characters in order to hold up a mirror to the audience, confronting them with their own death, which is something that humans did for a long time, before contemporary culture did away with reflecting on our own mortality.

Regardless of his international success, Laxe notes that in Spain he is still considered “a weird element”, adding that “I don't find very much mysticism in Spanish cinema. I would really like to belong, but I don't see in which tradition of Spanish cinema I would fit or what my place is in Spanish cinema.”