Line in the Sand: Oliver Laxe on Sirât

Tanned hands, lined with greening tattoos, stack loudspeakers in the desert, placing them one on top of another with a loving touch. Completed, this broad tower of boxy wooden speakers looks like a child’s building-block model of the vast, flat-topped rock formations it stands against. Powered on, the tower rumbles, pulsing waves of coarse-grained sound into the high walls of this ravers’ enclave.

Oliver Laxe’s Sirât (2025), the Galician-French director’s third feature, takes up with five itinerant dancers, and the middle-aged father who falls in behind them, as they journey from one illegal gathering to the next. Luis, played by Sergi López—one of only two actors in an ensemble of nonprofessional performers, most of them drawn from the traveling rave scene—is searching for his missing daughter, whose last known whereabouts he has traced to Morocco. When military personnel break up the party with which the film opens, Luis persuades a ragtag family of ravers to guide him on to Mauritania, where those beat-up speakers will reappear and, in this vertical sandstone landscape millions of years in the making, beat out their invitation to transcend. 

The action and story of Laxe’s visceral and propulsive film, his first to play in Competition at Cannes, takes place between these free parties, and between the trucks that form the ravers’ caravan, as it moves jerkily over gravel plains and trackless mountains. Their passage through the Western Sahara and the agonizing tests it sets at their feet are inspired by the bridge in hadith literature that gives Sirât its name. An epigraphic title card glosses the word: In Islamic teaching, souls may only reach paradise by crossing a bridge suspended over hell, its way “narrower than a strand of hair and sharper than a sword.” No less than its eschatological significance, it is this image’s simplicity that appeals to Laxe. Like Sirât, his Cannes-prizewinning debut feature, Mimosas (2016), maps a rite of passage onto a punishingly difficult physical journey. Visually arresting and parable-like, both films privilege image and narrative integrity over complexity, freeing up their death-bidden characters to experience metaphysical revelation or some critical shift in perception.

For this intuitive director—who speaks of first “dancing” his images before committing them to the page—it is not the filmmaker who should speak, but film language. All too easily and too often, he insists, cinematic images are degraded. Asphyxiated by ego and intellect, they reach the screen inert. For this reason, Laxe goes to great lengths to ensure his film’s images remain organic: intelligible without interpretation, even provisional. It is salient, then, that the title of this modestly plotted, moodily immersive film is drawn from an oral tradition wherein modern conceptions of authorship as sovereign and single have no application. At work on the screenplay for over ten years, laboring to remove all trace of themselves, Laxe and his regular cowriter Santiago Fillol have imparted to their third collaboration something of the reverberative, rendered-down simplicity—and authority—of scripture. Tapered to a point, Sirât penetrates like the oldest of stories, sensationally retold.

Putting in a call to New York, I talk with Oliver Laxe about the challenges of shooting in a desert climate, the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky, and how it was to collaborate with his Oscar-nominated sound team.

MUBI: Let’s start by discussing the technical realities of the shoot. What made you choose 16mm cameras?

OLIVER LAXE: I wanted to shoot in 35mm, but for reasons of budget, we had to shoot in 16mm. We also wanted to shoot in CinemaScope, with anamorphic lenses, but we were worried about going to the desert with them. These lenses are quite fragile, so if you have an issue, it’s difficult to find new ones. In the end, we shot with normal lenses. It was a good decision, though we still had problems. We had sandstorms for a few days and sand got into the lens. We had to reshoot a few sequences because of it. 

MUBI: Were you happy with the image texture, once you were looking at it in the edit? 

LAXE: Yeah, but nowadays, because of television, people are not used to the grain. To the point where we had to decrease it. 

MUBI: Because of feedback or because you anticipated an issue?

LAXE: We anticipated. It was too noisy. I like grain, but sometimes it’s too much, you know?

MUBI: In recent interviews, you’ve spoken about protecting the image from the intellect. I wonder if we could dig into that some more. What does that involve at the practical level and in a collaborative medium?

LAXE: The problem is this: We put too much weight into images, so that they arrive thirsty, or dead, to the edit. So what I do is, first, I have the taste of the image. When I introduce these images into my script, I know they’re important. So, through the scriptwriting process, I protect them. Then, with my team—with Santiago Fillol, whom I write with, and with my cinematographer [Mauro Herce]—we take care of these images; we don’t touch them much. We know cinema is about this. The ontology of cinema, it’s about these images. When you approach the shoot, that’s when you are under more pressure—from producers and from yourself—and sometimes we kill these images. You shouldn’t intellectualize images. Given how expensive it is to make a film, every image that you create…

MUBI: …is under pressure?

LAXE: Yeah, it’s instrumentalized to say something. But the problem is this: In the end, you have a film with no images. The films being made now, there’s no difference between watching them in a theater or on a plane, you know? 

MUBI: Oof.

LAXE: That’s a problem, and I think it’s the influence of television. There are filmmakers still not worried about it. I mean, films that are now contenders for Oscars, they are like… In Spanish, we say, “telefilm.” They’re like TV movies: There is not one image in them. I’m really surprised when people say to me about Sirât and about my movies, “I feel the images in my body. I still feel the images of your film.” They say this to me as if it were the only time they have felt this way. But it should always be like this!

MUBI: You mean, it shouldn’t be the exception, it should be the rule?

LAXE: Something is happening if people say this. It’s specific to this art that when you are in a theater, the images penetrate you, and transform you. 

MUBI: And this, for you, is what separates cinema from television?

LAXE: The theater is key. We are not going to the cinema just because the screen is bigger and the sound is better. We go for the social ceremony. And what happens in the theater is a catharsis, can be a catharsis, you know?

MUBI: But, surely, the way that you approach your image-making ensures that the same experience is available to the viewer watching at home?

LAXE: I mean… There are degrees, you know? There are gradations. Obviously, you die watching Sirât… wherever you are. When you watch the film, you completely die. That was our purpose. But to have a synesthetic relation with the image is only possible in a theater.

MUBI: There are a lot of hushes in the film. How did you approach writing a screenplay in which silence feels as important as any speech?

LAXE: When we make films, we trust in the ontology of cinema and in the cinematographic tools of expression. We use these, and we are mindful of the influences of theater and television. There is a way to evoke things through cinematic tools, so we do this whenever possible, always. It took us years to write the script, over ten years. Do you say “debugging” in English? When you “debug” a script? When you look for the essence of the thing? The script is only 50 pages. It’s really open and really atmospheric, and the film is a translation of the script. We had seven weeks of shooting and, with a lot of visual effects, we couldn’t improvise much, so the script is everything.

MUBI: Can we talk about sound design? Not only has your team been recognized by the Academy Awards, but they’ve made history as the first all-women sound team to be nominated for an Oscar. What was your experience of working alongside them?

LAXE: I’ve worked with Amanda [Villavieja] since Mimosas, so we’ve done three films together. She’s part of the family, along with Mauro Herce and Santiago Fillol, and Cristóbal [Fernández], the editor. It was the first time I’ve worked with Laia [Casanovas], the sound designer. And that was great! She was instrumental in taking the film in a certain direction. I wanted to make a genre film, you see. I really wanted for us to feel this film in the body, to watch the film with the skin. But at the same time I was insecure. I wanted to make a popular film, but not a mainstream one. Mainstream in the bad sense, you know, when the sounds are fake? You want to feel the sound, but you need to believe it. You need to trust that it’s real. This was Laia’s work. She was the best for harmonizing the sound. She was working on the sound of the film for nine months, and collecting realistic and really natural sounds for the first two months, recording to create a library…

MUBI: …a Foley library?

LAXE: Yeah. And now here we are, and [the industry’s] sound engineers are quite surprised. First, because the sound is used in a narrative way. It doesn’t just decorate the image. And, second, because they don’t know how we did it! But we are not geniuses! We all just invest time into our jobs, you know?

MUBI: The film opens on ravers dancing in the middle of the desert, on the spectacle of bodies and collective movement. I wonder if we could discuss ecstatic dance and the ways it influenced Sirât, beyond its representation in the film? As a practice, a principle, a relation to the environment, perhaps? 

LAXE: Did you know we were shooting a real rave? At one point, I wanted to intervene. I wanted to choreograph the dancing, but the deal we had with the ravers was that we couldn’t stop the party. I like techno and I like to dance, but on the dance floor of a free party there is no DJ. You are alone in front of the sound system. I found that place—that dance floor—therapeutic: a sacred, ceremonial place where you connect with your strength and your fragility, where your body tells you things about yourself. The body has a memory of your wounds, a memory of your transgenerational trauma: all the baggage that you have from your family. And this idea of the dance floor as a ceremonial place is something that we develop in that scene in the middle of the film, when the six of them are in the desert and they dance. They make a kind of ceremony and they dance. I think the actors in that scene were connected to a really intimate wound within themselves. It went beyond the film. Sergi, who plays Luis, is crying when he dances, but he always says he was not connected to the role in that moment. He was not thinking, “Okay, I am a father, I lost my daughter. I have to imagine myself having a daughter.” He was not working intellectually; he was just there and feeling things through his body. He was understanding things subtly through his body.

MUBI: That kind of movement is supposed to be unthinking, undeliberate, right? Conscious, but not calculated…

LAXE: That’s the challenge. To dance like nobody’s watching you.

MUBI: It seems to me there’s a connection between ecstatic dance and your desire to prevent the film’s images from becoming overwrought or overworked. The state of self-abandonment we associate with this kind of dancing resonates with the film’s themes. One could read it as a cautionary tale against seeking definitive answers, seeking absolutes. Your protagonist Luis wants answers—to set eyes on his daughter, and later his son. Not only is he denied those answers, but the desert deals him more questions, more ambiguity, more anguish. Is that a fair reading?

LAXE: It’s about loss. I mean, living is losing. That is the complexity of existence. You lose your health, you lose material things, you lose people. The film also says that when God loves you he breaks you. Life obliges the characters in Sirât to look inside and to accept what life hands them. We hope that the film is a mirror that pushes you to ask yourself questions: about your path, about your relationship with life and death. It’s a rite of passage for the characters, yes, but it’s also a rite of passage for the spectator.

MUBI: Speaking of paths and rites of passage, may we talk about Stalker [1979], which I know is a film you love and one that influenced Sirât? Rewatching Tarkovsky’s film, I could see the commonalities. All that industry of ambient sound, right from the beginning: the glass of water rattling on the nightstand at the passing train; later, the machinic rumbling, the rushing water… Throughout, sound seems immanent in the image. We could say the same of your film. How would you define the imprint of Stalker on Sirât?

LAXE: Before Stalker, we can talk about Nostalghia [1983]. Remember the scene in Nostalghia where the guy has to cross the swimming pool with a candle in his hand? If he can cross it without extinguishing the candle, he will save humanity. It’s a kind of rite of passage that influenced us a lot. I really like that scene, and it’s about faith, it’s about how to control your ego in a way. And yeah, Stalker was also an influence. I’m one of these people who thinks that there is not one leaf of any tree that doesn’t move for a perfect reason, an intelligent reason. Everything—life, reality—is inhabited. What I like about Stalker is that they are crossing the Zone, knowing, feeling, that the Zone is alive. And this is my perspective, not only in the desert of Sirât, but everywhere. It’s more difficult to feel it in a city, but… How can I say this? There’s a kind of creative intelligence behind everything… Call it God, call it whatever you want. 

MUBI: You’ve described Sirât as a film that entertains multiple readings, and you’ve spoken of your own resistance to interpreting the film’s images. How do you embed ambiguity in a film?

LAXE: So I can tell you two things. First, if we are looking for ambiguity, it’s because we know that life and beauty are complex. Life is ambiguous. At the same time, to return to what we were saying earlier, ambiguity is the way we protect the film from ourselves. If you put too much sense, too much mind in your images, the film will never transcend you. It will be at your level, because you have weighed down the images. When you keep things open, all the meanings can emerge, all the feelings can emerge.