It all starts with a bang. Sirât immerses itself into a spectacular DIY rave in the Moroccan desert, before its narrative kicks off proper. Engulfed by a swarm of dancing ravers, a father, his son, and their terrier emerge, handing out missing person flyers for their daughter/sister who is rumored to be among the partying crowd. In the thrumming opening sequence, Spanish filmmaker Óliver Laxe already shows how contrasting realities overlap in the desertous regions around the Moroccan Atlas mountains. This tension between individuality and collectivity will take on even more severe forms as the main plot of Sirât really kicks into motion.
When it turns out that Luis (Sergi López) and his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) are unsuccessful in their quest, they tag along with a small group of techno scenesters, who drive much deeper into the desert for an even more secluded rave. The notion of seclusion is central to Sirât’s narrative, a film in which people completely remove themselves from a society that seems to be on the verge of collapse. It’s hinted that World War III is raging in the background, while this odd band of characters ventures into extremely hazardous natural environments. By traversing the desert, plot gradually dissolves, to the point that the skeletal story of Sirât becomes nothing more than an existential quest of human survival.
Speaking about his fourth feature film after its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Laxe refers to this mechanism as “dematerialization.” It’s a recurring notion throughout his modest but impressive oeuvre, in which the director seeks to find a connection between the cinematic apparatus and the natural environments in which he shoots. His previous feature Fire Will Come (2019), about a convicted arsonist who returns to his village in Galicia, was a minimalist yet brooding drama that morphed into a fiery elemental thriller. With 2016’s Mimosas, in which Laxe first traverses the Atlas mountains of Morocco, the result is an experimental take on Westerns that gleefully messes around with chronology. And this level of experimentation was already established in Laxe’s debut feature You All Are Captains (2010), a playful metafilm about the filmmaking process, underlining that, for Laxe, cinema is a flexible tool that allows itself to be bent around stories, settings, characters, moods, and sentiments.
With Sirât, he has made his most impressive film to date. It’s an immersive road movie on a grand scale, with the most expressive scoring work and visuals in recent memory. It deservedly propelled Laxe to the main competition of Cannes, where he won the Cannes Jury Prize — an award he shared ex aequo with Mascha Schilinski for Sound of Falling. I sat down with Laxe to dive into the philosophical underpinnings that form the foundation of his incredible new picture.
Hugo Emmerzael: With Mimosas, you have made a film before about a spiritual journey through the Moroccan Atlas mountains. With Sirât, you revisit this location, albeit in an entirely different context. Why do you keep coming back to such extreme natural environments?
Óliver Laxe: I like to go push my limits. I think Sirât is a film that shows my views on what life is, and the ways in which life engages a dialogue with human beings. I see life as a way to learn new things — it’s a test of sorts. Making such a film is an opportunity to know yourself and to grow. I mean, in this film, what happens to our characters? Life knocks on their door. It appears suddenly and expresses itself in a tragic way. And ultimately, that’s a force of good. With enough time and distance, you can come to the conclusion that it perhaps had to be like this.
HE: In general, I see a fascination with death and destruction in your films.
ÓL: Ultimately, death is something that conforms to our psychology. However, we are living in a very thanatophobic society, where the notion of death disappears. But as a person, and as a filmmaker, I need to meditate on death. I think it’s healthy to see death not as an end, but rather as a passage to something. It means death allows you to speak more clearly about life.
HE: In that sense, the desert feels like a fitting environment for your films, as a kind of metaphysical passageway in itself. What significance does that have for you?
ÓL: All my films are first and foremost a rite of passage for myself. For me, the creative process is a process of self-discovery. And then I invite spectators along to this rite of passage. Being here in Cannes helps me to understand that ultimately, my film is a kind of cinematographic ceremony. The coordination of images allows for something to shake inside the viewer. We don’t know why this happens; all I hope is that this experience will be beneficial — at least, that’s the intention.
HE: I can only assume the shoot was laborsome. What were some of the greatest challenges you faced?
ÓL: One day we weathered a sandstorm, which broke most of the equipment and lenses. We had to repeat a lot of shots because of it. However, the most difficult shoot was for this important scene that happens on the top of the mountain. It’s a very intense scene, for which we had to use a lot of green screens. It was also a scene for which we didn’t have a map on how to do it. We didn’t know how to represent this in cinema yet, or how to interpret this. That was the real challenge.
HE: On the level of sound, the rave music that dominates the score really stands out. What’s your connection to this kind of techno?
ÓL: This type of techno and trance music has strong tribal influences. It’s very modern music, yet it’s closely connected to tradition. And as a human being, inside my body, I perceive a battle between tradition and modernity. That’s why I appreciate this community of ravers — some of my friends are deeply into it. They feel a bit like Peter Pans sometimes, but aren’t we all a bit of Peter Pan in the end? We all want to escape from some part of ourselves. And what I admire most about these ravers is that they are connected to their scars and wounds.
HE: Can you talk more about your collaboration with composer and techno producer David Letellier, AKA Kangding Ray, as it is his first scoring work ever for a major film project?
ÓL: I did a casting for musicians and he was just perfect. Some of his albums like Cory Arcane (2015) and Hyper Opal Mantis (2017) have a lot of rage to them. I also have a lot of rage inside me. You need that too, because in my view, an artist is someone between a terrorist and a saint. As for the score, the plan was for it to gradually dematerialize. We start with huge thumbing kick drums, in order to have a dialogue with this techno music, and put more rage in it. But slowly, the music invites us on a more transcendental, esoteric trip. The score becomes more ethereal and starts to dematerialize. This kind of dematerialization also expresses itself in the landscape, where we ultimately arrive in an abstract desert. It strips the human beings of everything. They are essentially naked, only able to look up to the sheltering sky. An instruction I gave David here was to find the first sound of the universe, which is what you hear in these trippy arpeggios near the end of the film. It’s like angels singing, you know?
HE: That fits the apocalyptic backdrop of the film, where World War III seems to be raging. Where does this doom-laden scenario come from?
ÓL: As they say in the film, “It’s been a long time since we’re at the end of the world.” Everything is just seeped in the feeling that we are at the end of something. Perhaps this is also why I like this rave culture, because it’s at least connected to traditions, while also embracing change. And to be honest, the world has to change. Us human beings, we are not able to change. That’s too difficult for us. So life has to change, in order for us to change along. In general, I distrust the idea of progress. That’s why I also don’t trust the intellectual movement of the Lumières, even if I’m their offspring in some form. For me, it’s healthy to have one leg in the past, to be really well rooted in tradition. The word “radical” comes from “roots,” from radicalis in Latin. So what makes a person radical? To be radical is to jump in the abyss in order to connect to oneself. In that sense, I think modernity lacks the tools that allow us to transcend ourselves, to really be emancipated.
HE: I would say Sirât itself also feels steeped in some grand cinematic traditions, without feeling nostalgic or bogged down by film history. How do the past and present film culture influence the way you want to approach your own films?
ÓL: What I like from cinema is this mix of high culture and popular culture. This is literally why we love cinema, because it allows you to express very vertical and transcendental things in a horizontal way. That’s so magnificent to me. That’s why I believe that artists should have some generosity towards the spectator. Obviously you shouldn’t lie to yourself, but I do think you have to come down from your horse to help the spectator to jump on your horse and sit behind your back. I see genre as a tool to help the spectator to climb on your horse, so you can take them wherever you want to go. All our civilizations have told epics that have two sides to them: the physical exterior and the metaphysical interior. As a filmmaker, I create images. And I think an image is a magical and really strange thing that operates in particular ways with human metabolism. That’s why I try to balance between narrative and non-narrative, between language and non-language, and between realism and poetry. I am always thinking about the images that are able to penetrate the spectator’s psyche even deeper.
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