by Hudson Moura
Sirât, written and directed by Óliver Laxe, follows a starkly simple itinerary whose implications steadily widen: a father (Sergi López) and his son cross the African desert, moving among raves, in search of the father’s missing daughter—yet the desert, with its scarcity, military presence, and pervasive conflict, quickly transforms that quest into something far more unsettling, a sensory pilgrimage in which the desire for reunion collides with a landscape, and a geopolitical horizon, that refuses consolation. The film’s opening title card frames this journey as a passage across a perilous bridge between Heaven and Hell, warned to be “thinner than a strand of hair and sharper than a sword”—an image that anticipates both the fragility and the violence that will shape the path ahead.
Their journey is enabled by a group of nomadic party-goers—an itinerant community that travels from one rave to another and, in doing so, becomes both guide and collective frame for the film’s meditation on freedom, vulnerability, and displacement.
The opening credits establish the film’s central aesthetic and philosophical proposition through electronic music: the rave is not presented as a bourgeois diversion or as a consumerist spectacle, but as an experience oriented toward connection—connection with oneself, with others, and with a form of heightened interior focus. The music, allied to the dancers’ performances, carries an uneasy pulse: liberation and discontent register simultaneously, inscribed in bodies that are not idealized but marked—scarred, disabled, paraplegic—bodies that insist on presence and on the right to intensity. The score of the film was composed by electronic musician David Letellier, known professionally as Kangding Ray. In this sense, the rave becomes less a setting than a practice: an attempt to reach a state of concentration, of inner resonance, through sound and movement.
Yet the desert that hosts these gatherings is never a neutral backdrop. It operates as a powerful symbol of freedom and catharsis, and at the same time as a trap: water is scarce and expensive; help is unavailable when one needs it; the military presence is pervasive and threatening. The landscape is beautiful, but it holds secrets and tragedies that unfold across the film. The desert, here, is also a space of conflict and migration—realities that the party-goers may wish to avoid, but cannot, because they are moving within a territory shaped by forces far larger than a private search for happiness, communion, freedom, or self-discovery.
At the centre of this tension is the father’s suffering, which is “unbearable” precisely because it is not performed as a set-piece; it is carried as a weight that warps every encounter, turning small gestures—questions, photographs, tentative pleas—into acts of desperation. Luis, played by Sergi López, embodies an agonizing form of searching—an affective intensity that the film refuses to soften. The personal ordeal remains inseparable from the environment that surrounds it: the search narrative is continually pressured by scarcity, danger, and the political textures of the land itself.
For these reasons, Sirat is not an easy film to watch, but it is a film that compels reflection: on otherness; on space and individuality; on histories and anxieties; on ways of life and codes that do not easily translate. One of the film’s most persistent questions—posed precisely through the contrast between violence and beauty—is what “war” represents in this landscape, and how its presence reorganizes everything the characters are trying to do, say, or avoid.
Sirât’s multicultural texture is integral to its meaning: primarily in Spanish and French, it unfolds within an international community seeking forms of happiness and connection across the mountains and desert of Morocco. The film’s awards trajectory—especially its Oscar nomination for Best Sound—is more than deserved, because sound is not an accessory here: it is the film’s connective tissue, its pathway to interiority, and its most forceful vehicle for both liberation and unease.
Be advised that this film will not be for every viewer: it is extremely difficult to watch, and the characters’ accumulating tragedies—staged with little respite—tend to linger with the audience long after the final scene.
Rating: 4.5/5