Oliver Laxe’s fourth feature, Sirat, arrives more like an event than an award-winning arthouse release. Since premiering at Cannes, where it shared the jury prize and won the soundtrack award, the film has steadily gained an audience, drawn less by plot than by the immersive experience. No film since Julia Ducournau’s Titane has made quite so much noise on the festival circuit.
Set against a desert rave and an unfolding threat of global apocalypse, Sirat has become a word-of-mouth sensation, praised for its surround sound design, physical intensity and deepening mysteries. We’ll say no more. There are so many rug-pull moments that even the scantiest description of Sirat counts as a spoiler.
“Making Sirat was therapeutic,” says Laxe of his desert rave epic. “I study Gestalt psychotherapy. Dancing connects you to trauma and memory. It heals. We must celebrate our wounds if we want to grow.”
Laxe, about 2m (6ft 7in) tall with inky hair reaching beneath his shoulders, has an enormously striking presence. At the recent lunch for Oscar nominees – Sirat is up for best international film and best sound – he seemed scarcely less glamorous than the nominated actors. At the European Film Awards, several Italian journalists blessed themselves and cried out “mamma mia” as he passed by.
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Hailing from Galicia, northwestern Spain, Laxe (43) is also a sharp, incisive talker. He has had much to explain since that sensational Cannes premiere. The ecstatic response to the film confirms a belief he has been shaping for years: cinema works most powerfully when it leapfrogs interpretation and goes straight for the cerebral cortex.
“I’m interested in the mysterious relation between cinema and metabolism,” says Laxe. “To hear images, to see sound; to make a sculpture where you don’t know where image ends and sound starts. To invite the spectator to a physical experience, not an intellectual one. Cinema must keep images alive. We live in a complex world. Too much rhetoric kills images. That’s what’s happening in contemporary cinema. Images are dead.”
He smiles: “We Galicians are known as an ambiguous people.”
Laxe’s films have consistently privileged sensation. Sirat is structured around a father’s frantic search for his missing daughter, a quest that prompts him to follow a loose caravan of ravers and outsiders as they drive deeper into hostile north African terrain.
“In Islam, the Sirat is the bridge you must cross,” says Laxe. “We wanted to make a genre film. Sorcerer and Mad Max were references for the physical adventure. But Sirat is also existentialist and metaphysical. For that, my master is Tarkovsky. Our desert is like the Zone in Stalker. It’s not just a space for rave. Spirituality is essential.”
That makes sense. William Friedkin’s Sorcerer shares similar suspense sequences. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is in the same metaphysical region. But the sonic landscape of Sirat is unique. The pounding electronic music, composed by Kangding Ray (David Letelier), shook the 2000-seater auditorium at the Cannes premiere. Even Laxe was worried it was too loud. The film-maker was inspired to collaborate with the musician after hearing the synth artist’s 2014 album Solens Arc. They worked on the thundering score for more than a year.
As the narrative darkens and tensions escalate, the score evolves from driving techno to more ambient and ethereal sounds, with a sound design led by Laia Casanovas that utilises ambisonic desert recordings and shifting wind textures. I meet Laxe two days after Casanovas was named best sound designer at the European Film Awards. Sirat took home best cinematography, best editing, best production design and best casting prizes at that ceremony.
“In all my films, sound is important,” says Laxe. “I’m a little bit of a musician. I’m not only a film-maker of images. I’m a film-maker of the senses. The magnetism of image and sound: this is everything. Receiving awards for sound, cinematography and editing is important because this is the film. A film that has to be watched with your skin. Cinema must be an experience that transforms you. Otherwise, people will just watch films on platforms.”
Laxe did not emerge from the usual European film-school pipeline or festival incubators. After growing up in northern Spain and studying film in Barcelona, with a brief period in London, he became disenchanted with what he saw as a narrow and industrialised conception of filmmaking. In common with Carla Simón’s Vigo-set Romería and Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s Basque drama, 20,000 Species of Bees, Laxe is at the vanguard of a new, regional cinema.
“Spanish cinema, even filmmakers living in the peripheries, look to Madrid as a reference,” says Laxe. “I don’t think they understand me. I don’t belong to their tradition, the Spanish tradition of cinema. Their dream, their imagination, belonged to an older generation where a few of us could study outside. We are more connected with avant-garde movements internationally. Most of us show our films outside Spain, so we have more legitimacy outside Spain than inside. That was my case. I’m a freak here in Spain. I live in the mountains in Galicia. I don’t live in Madrid or Barcelona. I feel love – they take care of me in a way – but I’m totally something else.”
In his early 20s, he decided to work independently, accepting marginal positions and making small-scale projects with minimal resources. At 24, he moved to Tangier in Morocco, where he lived for more than a decade. That period proved formative.
“I went to Morocco because I was living in London: this city that doesn’t belong to anyone,” he recalls. “I really suffered. I didn’t understand anything there. I was totally lost. But when I went to Tangier, suddenly it was like I was understanding everything, even if I didn’t know Arabic. Something in the mood, in the vibe of the people, the human connection: it really gave me roots. I felt a continuity of values between my family – I’m from a peasant family in Galicia – and Morocco. Same values, the same way to stay in the world. That was good for me.”
In Morocco, Laxe worked closely with local communities, particularly children, developing films through collaboration rather than strict scripts. The experience culminated in his debut feature, You Are All Captains, from 2010, which unexpectedly brought him international attention and his first appearance at Cannes. His subsequent films, including Mimosas and Fire Will Come, also premiered at the festival, establishing a pattern in which his uncompromising approach was met increasing recognition and awards, including the Fipresci Prize for directors’ fortnight, the Grand Prize during critics’ week, and the Un Certain Regard jury prize.
“Without Cannes, I would never make films the way I do,” says Laxe. “They champion fragile, sensory films against television and script-driven cinema. No Spanish television station wanted to work with me. But Cannes is a space of resistance. They give filmmakers freedom in their own countries. Now I can do whatever I want. They recognised my intuitions are true before anybody else.”
Despite that success, Laxe has continued to frame his career as one shaped by uncertainty and crisis rather than careful planning. He often describes creative growth as something that emerges from instability and risk. Sirat embodies that attitude. The film was shot on Super 16 – an uncertain, grainy format – in harsh environments in Morocco and Spain. Laxe was drawn to that terrain not for its beauty, but for its sharp edges. In Sirat, mountains and deserts are imposing spaces that diminish human control and expose vulnerability.
“I like challenges,” says Laxe. “This was my easiest film. Because I had no money and fewer people. This was my easiest shoot. Sometimes we were based in camps, making bivouacs in the mountains or in the desert. Other times we had hotels. It was quite hot – 45 degrees – because we were shooting in July. What happens behind the camera appears on screen. If people take risks, life gives gifts. We suffered making this film. Life takes from you, but it also gives. That wasn’t smart. But the biggest difficulty in a shoot is yourself. It’s not the decisions you took, not the producers, not the actors. It’s something inside. You’re surrounded by fears. Sirat is a really risky film. You jump into the abyss. That’s the real difficulty.”
Casting also reflects Laxe’s priorities. While Sirat features a veteran actor in Sergi López, much of the ensemble consists of non-professionals drawn from the underground rave scene and long-time collaborators. Many of them carry visible physical or emotional scars. Laxe avoids conventional character development, relying instead on presence, gesture and the weight of lived experience. Unsurprisingly, Nadia Acimi, Luís Bértolo and María Rodrigo beat out the starrier Sentimental Value to win the European Film Academy’s inaugural casting award.
“The European Academy is an academy that doesn’t have many actors,” says Laxe. “Maybe that’s why we won. Because actors don’t like to give prizes to people who work with non-professional actors. It was a work of genius that María and the team did. First, we did a big exploration in the rave and free-party culture. We were, in a way, inside that culture. What we did was buy a truck and go through a calendar of raves. Just meeting people until we found who we needed.”
With Sirat, Laxe has reached his widest audience yet. The film has been acquired for international distribution and has clocked up those Oscar nominations, while drawing younger viewers through its music and rave culture imagery. But don’t expect Laxe to turn Hollywood.
“Next time, I’ll be even more radical,” he says. “I’m a visceral film-maker. I work from my guts. The film kidnaps me. I want to go to the Amazon. We’ll see where it ends.”
Sirat is in cinemas from February 27th
