Spoiler Warning: This piece discusses all major events in the film.
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Óliver Laxe’s Sirāt fuses the fear of losing oneself with the trembling topography of the desert; an experiment on existence itself. “Sirāt” – the bridge in Islamic eschatology between paradise and hell, thinner than a hair, sharper than a sword. In Laxe’s film, it is the line on which humans walk the edge of their own existence: one foot in meaning, the other in chaos.
The film opens at a rave in the southern Moroccan desert. Kangding Ray’s bass lines shake the sand, trying to drown out the underlying existential dread. An anxious father, Luis, frantically hands out flyers bearing the photo of his missing daughter Mar, his son Esteban, and their dog Pipa at his side. As the crowd dives deeper into the desert under the shadow of an impending global war, the search mutates and turns into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Here the viewer encounters a partially erased or corrupted narrative fabric (the structural equivalent of skipping footage).
This is Laxe’s Sirāt, winner of the 2025 Cannes Jury Prize. Contrary to conventional narrative threads, Laxe turns a story made of sub-literary material into a canvas, presenting it through his own thoughts in a political mise-en-scène. By doing so, he flips the truth that directors are condemned to analyse the world and reality, and with Sirāt’s dignified, perfectly conscious, self-renewing structure he designs a meta-artistic activity.
Threshold of the Beginning: Everything Started with Sand
Every mine buried in the sands is not a question mark but a detonator that explodes the conflict between primal impulses and social order. The minefield becomes the apocalyptic bridge Sirāt: one wrong step means falling from paradise to hell, from order to pure instinct.
A Galician nomadic soul rooted in Morocco, Laxe transforms the desert from an ordinary backdrop into a pastoral laboratory where the soul cracks and the sacred intertwines violently with violence. Jean-Luc Godard’s succinct definition – “the analysis of something with images and sounds”1 – appears before us in a way.
The barren expanse becomes an arena where man confronts himself; the experiment now swallows and shakes the viewer too. Every buried mine is the exploding echo of repressed impulses. Soldiers appear in the desert. The music stops, the lights go out, European passport holders are swiftly evacuated. This is not just a “security operation”; it is the cinematic version of the invisible controls that regulate life – the cold mechanism that decides who lives and who is left behind in the sand. War is no longer fought on front lines but in rhythms, desires, bodies. Here Laxe once again demonstrates his mastery, restoring cinema – both high and popular art – to its role as the art of authenticity. Essentially, by presenting aristocratic taste through his own abstraction, he adapts it to the mass class that is cinema’s true destiny.
Nomad Horde
This moment is a total chaos machine: the soldiers’ neat ranks collide with the rave’s scattered crowd. State order cracks. The desert remains the only place no one can govern – lawless, godless, alive. Kangding Ray’s silenced bass still trembles in the sands. The sound is dead but the vibration continues.
That vibration is like a nomadic war machine: no map, no general. Only sand, sweat, and rage. The Sirāt bridge is reborn here: on one side passport order, on the other passport-less chaos.
Laxe’s camera wanders in this crack: the Sirāt bridge is redrawn between the aesthetics of power and the aesthetics of desire. Dream or dance? Maybe both.
Echoing Collapse in the Sands
The search for hope that begins in the desert drags Luis into a journey within the system. The minority class he now belongs to becomes, in a way, the voice of silence.
The Iron Lady of the 20th century, Margaret Thatcher, served as prime minister from 1979 to 1990. Privatisation, the breaking of unions, the empowerment of financial centres turned London into a global capital hub while devastating old industrial regions. Millions were left jobless; unemployment in Britain exceeded three million in the early 1980s. This social rage manifested itself in everything from hooliganism to anarchist youth movements and cultural explosions.
The effects of this collapse were not limited to Britain. The neoliberal policies that David Harvey calls “creative destruction”2 wrought the same devastation in the Global South. The rave in the Moroccan desert is the echo of this global ruin. Jobless, migrant, outcast bodies meet under the same rhythm; dance is no longer entertainment but political action – the aesthetics of destruction, the rhythm of resistance.
Killing Love in Civilisation
In the course of the journey, the film suddenly shifts from social critique to existential trance. Capitalist civilisation forces us to work, to accumulate, to the illusion of “wholeness.” It is precisely here that the cursed layer of the society Luis now belongs to comes into play. A moment where death intersects with desire, spilling outside the cycle of “useful production.” In Georges Bataille’s concept of the Accursed Share (La part maudite)3, every system produces unaccumulable energy that must be expended. We read this energy through the energy emerging in the rave dances of this lost group. Laxe offers us – unlike the conventional Western style that usually presents one of many possible interpretations of a pre-existing story – something that marches across the eye with undeniable effect, unconcerned with exaggerated scale, through a theatre of dramatic savagery.
The Camera Slides Ruthlessly Over the Desert
Desert beige, rave neon red. It looks simple, but Laxe uses these two colours pastorally. In the director’s palette, daytime desert is pale, matte, sweat-inducing “warm yellow” skin, depicting the inner fire that burns both passion and death. The rave’s neon red is artificial, sweaty, metallic – active colours: artificial trance replacing the mind, melting the body. The camera slides between these two colours, making the viewer experience the visual violence between active colours (the desert’s warm tones) and passive colours (the rave’s artificial red). A grain of sand stings the eye, then a strobe flash burns. The viewer is disturbed because Laxe’s aim is not to narrate but to inject the colours under the viewer’s skin.
Kangding Ray’s bass throbs not in the chest but in the gut. Sand shifts under the feet, sweat runs down the back. Watching the film is not seeing but a bodily experience. The desert’s warm tones call man back to nature; the rave lights promise a post-human body: sweat, dust, blood – all melt in the same neon shadow. Laxe uses the camera like a second skin. He doesn’t show; he touches. When a mine explodes, the red on screen is not just “blood” but the shock the viewer feels in their own flesh at that moment.
What Remains
This film is not an individual search story. Everyone in the desert – Moroccan shepherd, unemployed European, refugee, rave fugitive – vibrates to the same rhythm. Luis searches for his daughter, but what is really sought is the collapse of belonging. The character’s only rule is to keep searching – an endless walk without reunion, pain as the only honest currency left in the desert. State soldiers arrive, the music stops, Europeans are taken away by helicopter. Those left behind? They unite in the same sand, the same thirst, the same lingering bass vibration.
Laxe calls this a “collective body.” No map, no passport, no identity. Only sweat, dust, and rhythm. From Morocco’s urban slums to its abandoned mining towns, from Paris’s ghetto raves to here, the same exclusion dances.
The desert is the only void Empire cannot besiege. Soldiers silence the sound, but an endless, blind will trembles in the sand. The Sirāt bridge is neither paradise nor hell; it is the inevitable line where existence surrenders itself to that will – merciless, unnecessary, destructive.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
