A Journey Through the Desert: Unveiling the Enigmatic "Sirāt"
I had the privilege of watching Oliver Laxe's film "Sirāt" for the first time at the Carthage Film Festival in 2025. The experience was so intense and unsettling that I felt the need to revisit it, to immerse myself in its world once again, during the closing ceremony of the Gabès Cinéma Fen festival on May 2nd. It was like returning to a shock or an enigma.
Since its premiere at Cannes, the film has been met with divided reactions. Some have been fascinated, while others have been repelled. The sharp reactions say less about a taste divide than about a test of the viewer's gaze. "Sirāt" is not a film that one "likes" or "dislikes." It disrupts, it disorients, and it is precisely this that something is at play. In the Moroccan desert, between techno beats and the diffuse presence of death, Oliver Laxe constructs an experiential sensory experience that challenges the viewer's habits.
Narrative codes crack, references falter, and characters themselves seem traversed, displaced, as if they were only thresholds. The film acts as a passage zone, a crossing rather than a story. The director speaks of a meditation on death, a meditation without discourse, without a dominant perspective. Something more raw, more buried. Watching "Sirāt" is to accept losing one's grip, no longer understanding everything, to perhaps access another form of perception.
At 44, Oliver Laxe imposes himself as a singular voice in contemporary cinema. From his first two films, "Vous êtes tous des capitaines" and "Mimosas, La voix de l'Atlas" (awarded at the Semaine de la critique), to "Viendra le feu," and now "Sirāt," crowned with the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes, his work traces an exacting path, traversed by the sacred, stripping, and a mystical attention to the real. Invited to Tunisia as part of Gabès Cinéma Fen, which dedicated a retrospective to him, the director was present to accompany this crossing. The opportunity to open, with him, some breaches in his work, which, more than it tells, lives.
An Interview with Oliver Laxe
You have lived in France, Spain, and Morocco...
I am the son of Galician emigrants who met in Paris, where they were building superintendents. I was born there and, at six years old, we returned to Galicia. After my university studies, I left for Morocco, guided by an intuition. There, I was inspired cinematically. I lived there for ten years, during which I made my two first feature films in the southern region, where I lived in a palm grove. Then, I returned home, to the valley where my mother was born. I am currently installed there. It is one of the most depopulated regions in Europe, with 4 people per km². It is there that I shot my third film, "Viendra le feu." And I returned to Morocco, again, to shoot my fourth film, "Sirāt," in the Errachidia region (NDLR: pronounced in Arabic, as the director speaks Moroccan). So, I have shot more films in Morocco than in my own country.
How do you explain your interest in Morocco? It is what led you to Sufism?
I feel at home there. There are also the people, the landscapes, the geology of the country, its transcendence. There is something mythological there.
It is there that my taste for Sufism was awakened, let's say. I felt something very familiar. And then, I am still Spanish: there is a continuity of values. One day, I met a sheikh who told me: "Under the zarbia, under the carpet, there is Islam in Spain." You don't see it, but it's there, in family values, in the sense of community...
After that, there are al-hamd, al-chokr, pillars that I have always found in my peasant family in Spain. There is also this similarity in the gestures of everyday life of peasants. All this made me feel a sense of familiarity in the Moroccan countryside, I felt a little at home.
This awakened something in me. I consider myself a spiritual refugee. We, Westerners, are in some way spiritual refugees who are heading south. This quest led me to Mauritania, Senegal, Turkey, Iran, to countries where Muslim culture displaces the ego.
We find this in "Sirāt" and before it, "Mimosas," which carried the seeds...
Yes, indeed. At the time, I wanted to make "Sirāt," but I didn't have the experience or the means yet. It wasn't the right time yet. But I wanted to make a film about death or at least deny the idea that we die, to remind us that death is a "see you later," not a goodbye.
Just like that, "Sirāt" approaches death in a radical way, but reconciles us with it...
I think that's a film that can be better understood in a Muslim latitude. I consider that the confrontation with death is often more mature in Muslim societies than in Western societies. In fact, in some Western countries, people sometimes ask me why my characters die, and I find this question quite innocent. People die because they must die, and they die when they must die. The question is not why they die, but rather when will they die, and what do we do before dying?
That's what explains why death manifests itself in a very brutal and violent way in this film?
At the same time, all the characters in "Sirāt" die with dignity, there's one who dies dancing, celebrating; another dies helping... Transcendent deaths.
I wanted the viewers to die before dying (El mout kbal el mout, as we say here) while watching the film. That was my way of taking care of them. Very quickly, when I arrived in Morocco, I became aware of my spiritual immaturity, and this film is part of a personal process to learn to die, to learn to accept. Acceptance – and that's faith – that even if life expresses itself through accidents or tragedy, there is a rahma (mercy) behind it, there is a gift, there is wisdom... At least, that's what I wanted it to be (smiling).
This film is very sensory, it summons all our senses, the skin, the guts, even the heart...
I trust in images, I trust in the specific tools of cinematic expression. I find that today there are too many influences from television, series, theater, and literature. I am part of this lineage of filmmakers who defend the specificity of this art, which makes us feel the images and the sound with our skin, and which can remain in us, inside, to scratch and awaken years later. I find that the image can awaken our level of perception, a bit like a dhekr, a hadhra.
This implies an enormous amount of the body...
For me, a movie theater is a ritual space that awakens something in our bodies. That's what I work with. I study the psychology of gestures. I am very interested in psychology, but I don't like psychology in cinema. I work mainly with the body, I am very interested in how the body reacts in a movie theater. And "Sirāt" confirms that the viewer is very sensitive and complex. It involves many levels of perception, but the problem is that we are too much in our heads.
Indeed, we tend to rationalize too much...
We don't try to understand a dream. We make love and we don't try to understand it. But on the other hand, a work of art, we tend to want to understand it. Cinema is a tool conducive to transcendent apprehensions, but unfortunately, we only use 50% of its power. It's like you could drive a Ferrari and you chose to take a small car. Cinema takes us far.
Talking about cars, you seem to have a certain interest in vehicles. We see that in "Mimosas" and "Sirāt"...
(Smiling) For me, there is this notion of speed, of the knight's journey that must advance, that doesn't look back, and that, despite the difficulty of the path, continues to advance. After that, I like it when it's a bit old-fashioned cars, old and the mechanical side that conveys a certain melancholy and a poetry of a less "technified" world.
There is also dance and sound that occupy a primary place in "Sirāt"...
I find that a dance floor is like a movie theater, a ritual space where your body gives information about your fragility, your wound. But as I also do a lot of dhekr and hadhra, it's a bit the same. Raves are the fruits of a society that doesn't have dance rituals, not like yours where society has this tool to transform its energy. The rave is the equivalent of that in societies that don't have spiritual development tools.
