As music thumps across the desert landscape of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains and ravers give themselves over to the endless bass, whispers of World War III echo in the margins. In Sirāt, Oliver Laxe’s fourth feature, pinning down exactly what the extraneous conflict is outside the walls of the mountains would be missing the forest for the trees. The journey, or “Sirāt” as it were, is one of letting go––of the material and physical, and in turn merging your consciousness with the wider world and its people.
No stranger to the Atlas Mountains––his second film, Mimosas, was also set there––Laxe returns with what’s been described as his take on The Wages of Fear. Having received word that she’d be attending, a father (Sergi Lopez) shows up at the rave looking for his missing daughter. As a military group forces the ravers out, a small band of friends splinters off to find another rave deeper in the mountains. The father and his son join them, and from there a treacherous journey tests their physical and mental fortitude. The comparisons to the Clouzot classic or Friedkin’s remake, Sorcerer, are both apt and ultimately superficial at best. Laxe’s search is one of the spiritual.
Like all of his work, Sirāt (which takes its name from a bridge described in the Quran that crosses from hell to paradise) is, at heart, an extension of Laxe’s own spiritual journey. He filters his own questions of faith through a test of people and the environment they occupy. As the group trucks across the desert, the landscape begins fighting back. Is this punishment for the wars breaking out in the real world? Is it the land lashing out at a predominantly white group of people invading land that isn’t theirs? Could it simply be harsh terrain that no human should be foolish enough to travel? Laxe leaves it up to interpretation, instead focusing on how people might repurpose a faith in something deeper into each other and find the will to survive.
Laxe is an image-forward filmmaker and Sirāt is his most esoteric work yet. Taking his already singular voice and applying it to a more populist sensibility, one with clear markers pointing towards Mad Max, the film is a beguiling explosion of bodies and basslines. Large swaths of Sirāt unspool wordlessly, allowing one to soak in both the director’s deep love for nature and his anger over what we’ve done to it, particularly in a region rife with colonialism.
During Sirāt’s appearance at the New York Film Festival, I sat down with Laxe to discuss the film, spirituality, and remaining tethered to an increasingly broken, tenuous world.
The Film Stage: This is the biggest film you’ve made yet, with, for lack of a better term, blockbuster or mainstream sensibilities. During some of the Q&As, you’ve spoken about attempting to make a more audience-friendly film with Sirāt. Can you tell me about the balance of striving for that while leaving your voice intact?
Oliver Laxe: That was one of the risky things. There is a dimension of servanthood in my cinema, so I really want to make films that are watched by people. That was one of the intentions: to plant a seed into the minds of popular spectators, or mainstream audiences. People who are probably not used to watching these kinds of films. I was especially interested in making films aimed at a younger audience. I was 20 years old when I discovered films with soul, and that helped me a lot.
I was cold then, and cinema really warmed my soul and made me discover that I even have a soul inside. So I wanted to make the same kind of film for someone who may be experiencing that now. I trust in cinema, I trust in images, I like popular cinema, I like genre cinema, I like American genre cinema. It’s part of my culture, and I trust the audience. It’s a combination of all of that. Trusting that an image is something that can penetrate human metabolism and stay there for a long time. For me, cinema is about proportions, it’s about geometry, it’s about spiritual geometry. An image is a mysterious thing.
Spirituality is present throughout all of your work, and here it manifests in people giving themselves over to dance. How connected were you with rave culture before making the film?
I was going to raves a lot in France, in Morocco, in Spain, in Portugal. I like to dance and I like electronic music. I identified with this community. I’m not a raver; I’m an artist. I have a distance from reality, unfortunately. For me, it was important to pray with my body. Rave allows me to purge my energy and, most importantly, to connect with my wounds or my scars. It’s interesting because on the dance floor, you connect with your strength, but also with your fragility. Your body has a memory of your wounds. So when you’re dancing, you connect with the child, abandoned child, you connect with all the pain of your ancestors. You are connected with your unconscious. You are connected with the collective unconscious.
It’s powerful, to me, to be on a rave on the dance floor, surrounded by these people doing the same thing. A cinema is the same. In a cinema we are sitting in the dark and there is no familial relation with the people we are sitting with. But there is a subtle, energetic relation with the people as you watch the film. I wrote this script and I developed these images while dancing on the dance floor; I was there and I was imagining the film. I think this is what’s great about my cinema nowadays: I have the strength to project the images first. All these images that I had dancing on the dance floor ten years ago, twelve years ago, I project them through the script-writing process and through the production process. And they arrive at the editing process alive, these images. This is the problem of independent cinema nowadays, cinema in general: images are dead.
They’re dead. And why are they dead? Because they have too much weight. They are there to say things, to say too many things, to over-explain something. An image doesn’t have the responsibility to say something; they have to evoke something. So this is the problem. I understand, though, because the filmmaking process is really long, but the filmmakers end up killing the images and you feel nothing. Here, in America, you had a master like David Lynch who understood how to stop at the right moment. As a filmmaker, you are the worst enemy of your art. You have to know how to stop and to have confidence in your images.
Photo by Godlis, courtesy of New York Film Festival
It sounds like a faith––in your films, in yourself, and in something beyond you––guides you through the entire process.
I don’t want to talk too much about my spiritual practice because it belongs to my own intimacy, but I can tell you that my process currently is really related to my personal development. I don’t know where one starts or the other finishes. In a way, I live on a kind of sirāt, and the mechanism of life that is expressed in Sirāt is the one that I have.
Sirāt and all my films talk about this sovereign submission. This submission to a thing that is bigger than you. Sirāt evokes that life doesn’t give you what you are looking for, just like cinema. As filmmakers, we are frustrated because we are not achieving what we are looking for. We may be looking for one thing, but life is giving us what we really need. In the film, the characters are suffering. This is key because, as a human, it means we are too attached to what we’re looking for and we don’t surrender enough; we don’t accept enough of what life gives us. Having this spiritual practice is what helps me to be more courageous.
When we were in Cannes, people were saying, “I mean, come on, where are you coming from?” This film is extremely risky from different perspectives, especially in a time like now. The fear is all around. We are living in a society with a huge amount of fear––even artists have fear. In my case, I see the danger, but I’m attracted to it. Psychologically, I’m counterphobic.
For me, failure doesn’t exist because I know that failure and faith are the things that will make me grow. I accept faith in my life, but when I’m making films––when I’m making decisions, obviously––I have an ego. I projected that I wanted to make it to Cannes, for example. But if I didn’t make it to Cannes, if my film is a total failure and nobody watches it, I will still grow. That will make me grow. That’s what I’m interested in: I’m interested in my spiritual path. So that’s why that allows me to jump into the abyss, because I know that is what life is asking of me. “Who are you” is what life asks us.
Your work is inextricable from nature. Mimosas and Sirāt both sit in the gorgeous Atlas Mountains; the latter explicitly pits a dangerous environment against its people. Fire Will Come is all about the devastation of nature within the mountains of Spain. How important is it to you to always have that reminder of how precious this all is?
Currently, I am actually living in the place where I shot Fire Will Come. I shot that in the village where my mother was born, in the mountains of Spain. I bought the house of my grandmother, the place where we shot, and I’m living there now. So obviously, like all human beings, I’m attracted to nature and I’m making sacrifices to live there. I don’t live in Barcelona or Madrid. Now, why do I shoot in nature? Because nature is a manifestation; it’s not just a cool place, a beautiful place, a beautiful land to make films.
I’m not shooting nature because it’s beautiful. I’m shooting nature because nature is manifesting, nature is testing us all the time. It’s testing my characters, it’s testing me. Again, like life, nature doesn’t give you what you’re looking for; it gives you what you need. And sometimes, the way nature shakes us, it’s strong and it’s tough and it’s difficult for us, but I have the faith that it is always for a good purpose. I have that certainty in my heart.
What is it that you love about working with non-actors? That’s also present across your work.
I don’t love to work with nonprofessional actors; it’s really tough and difficult to work with them. [Laughs] I love them as people, but the process is difficult and it takes time. Acting can be an insecure thing, I think.
What’s that collaboration like? Do they bring themselves fully formed, or are their characters all in the script?
I don’t write much about my characters. Thank God that they finance my films not because of my scripts but because they trust me. When I write my scripts, though, I usually have people in mind, friends in mind. After we did casting on Sirāt, many of these people changed. It’s funny how my characters end up being mixed with reality and fiction. When you read my scripts, you don’t know who is who because the way I write is not the canonical way. I know that I make images and I have a sensitivity to that first. I always start with the image.
I don’t know if I get the soul of my characters. That is my purpose, sure, but what I can get is their wounds, their trauma through image. When you can do this, you don’t need to develop a character the way a script-writing book might teach you. I don’t need to develop the trauma in words. My images do that because they’re alive, not dry; they evoke things. I’m interested in psychology. Personally, in my daily life, I’m studying Gestalt psychotherapy. I’m studying the different types of neurosis that human beings have. I’m always analyzing people from a psychological perspective. I think that image can transcend something psychological.
It’s refreshing to hear about your writing process, because I’m a much more image-forward viewer.
That’s good for a writer. It’s good that you didn’t lose your innocence, because many writers watch films with too much of their brains. [Laughs]
Photo by Colleen Sturtevant, courtesy of New York Film Festival
I feel that. [Laughs] I mean, script is obviously important, but sometimes it’s far more fulfilling to surrender to the image.
I think film’s purpose, sometimes, is to knock the brain out a bit. To let yourself dream.
Are you familiar with the term “brain rot”?
Brain rot?
It’s good that you aren’t, but what we’re talking about connects a bit to a thought I had about the film. So brain rot, in simplest terms, is a way to describe what happens to your brain from watching endless streams of TikTok or Instagram reels or whatever else is polluting the Internet. It’s like we’re just wasting our consciousness away and ignoring the world around us. That was on my mind throughout Sirāt because, as tethered as these people are to dance and the endless music, they’re completely detached from what’s happening outside of their mountains, which seems to be World War III. I guess this is a long way of me asking: how do you, personally, stay tethered?
Well, now, I’m in the United States, then I’m in London, then Morelia, but after that I need two weeks. I will be with my Sufi master in India. I’m going to be making a pilgrimage to India. I really need a balance; I need a reality. It’s important for me. Right now I’m in a period of too much stimulation to my brain, my ego. So I need tools to control my ego.
And it’s not easy. It’s not easy nowadays to have our spiritual practice. Me being a filmmaker, it’s difficult to have habits. Spirituality is about habits––to have habits, to have discipline. The key thing is being from this world, not being from this world. I mean, it’s not good to live in a separate community. Your ego has to be connected to something more. As far as staying tethered to my cinema? I’m happy, Brandon. I’m happy that I’m making cinema that is not the most popular, in terms of subjects or in terms of the way I tailor my images. I’m happy that I’m arriving at a moment where my spiritual and artistic paths seem to be merging.
My next film will be even more spiritual and sensory, I hope. Now I have the opportunity to jump from a building of 50 floors, in a sense. In some ways it’s like you said: Sirāt is a little more mainstream and industrial, more genre. But I still had to jump from the top of the building. The next jump will be even higher. I have the opportunity to make an even bigger skyscraper and then jump from the top.
I read this in another interview, but I have to ask. When you were describing Sirāt’s conception, you tossed off Wacky Races as a reference. I grew up watching that every Saturday morning, and to see it in the context of this film delighted me. How much of that was on your mind here?
I didn’t watch it much, to be honest. It’s not a cartoon that you say, “Okay, wow, that penetrates me.” [Laughs] But it was just the first idea that I had in 2010, 2011, when I started our treatment. It was first––a race of trucks in Morocco with particular characters that I found––then I got connected with rave culture. Then I was able to merge these images of trucks across the desert with dance.
I have to say, as we wrap, I’m not at all a spiritual person but…
Are you on a path at all?
Not currently, no. Maybe just vaguely searching. I find it most when I surrender to images in a cinema, like we were talking about before. I don’t know that I’ll ever get there, but I like the possibility of giving myself over to something, even if it’s not traditionally spiritual. Sirāt really did that for me, as did this conversation.
Brandon, this is one of the most beautiful things that people can say to me. That’s why I make films. I seek to do the same that my masters did––that Bresson, that Tarkovsky did. They really connect with me, with my essence in my filmmaking. So my advice is: if you want to grow, if you want it, just ask for a master, whatever or whoever that may be, whatever it means to you. You make an invocation of this, and something will appear. Again, it’s often not what you want but what you need.
Sirāt begins a one-week awards-qualifying run on Friday, November 14 and will open in theaters in January 2026.
The post “Images Are Dead”: Oliver Laxe on Sirāt and Spirituality first appeared on The Film Stage.
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