Sirât

Oliver Laxes · 2025 · 115 minutes
Nov. 7 · Regal 1 · 10:00 p.m.

A father, accompanied by his son, goes looking for his missing daughter in North Africa.

Programmer’s Note

Sirât opens in the Moroccan desert, where a shabby, sun-ravaged pack of itinerant ravers are assembling tall stacks of speakers. From snippets of news reports, we learn that in other, more civilized corners of the world, a catastrophic war has broken out. The thumping electronic music begins, followed by the ecstatic, drug-fueled dancing, and into this beautiful chaos wanders Luis (Sergi López) and his adolescent son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), who are searching for Luis’s missing daughter Marina.

Borrowing its title from the Islamic image of a razor-thin bridge separating Paradise from Hell, Sirât joins a short list of great films that can be described as truly apocalyptic cinema. Critics compare it to the Mad Max movies, and to The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953) and its American remake, Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977), in which two trucks loaded with volatile explosives are driven over a rocky mountain pass. But writer-director Oliver Laxe — born in France, raised in Spain, of Galician descent, frequent North African nomad — has a more spiritual bent than those filmmakers, and his vision of the End Times is more mystical, terrifying, and visceral.

Shot in 16mm with a cast of mostly non-professional actors, Sirât is an uncanny, immersive experience, as if we in the audience have been (un)lucky enough to be welcomed into this tribe alongside Luis and Esteban. Much of that experience owes to the score by French DJ Kangding Ray, which, if all goes as planned, will rattle your teeth. To borrow the opening title card from Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz: “The film should be played loud!”

Sirât won the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and is Spain’s official entry for the Academy’s best international feature Oscar.