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CairoScene
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
Cannes Review: ‘Sirat' Is a Journey Through Hell
Cannes Review: 'Sirat' Is a Journey Through Hell A rave erupts in the heart of the Moroccan desert. Speakers throb like engines in the sand. The dirty clearing is surrounded by the Atlas Mountains looming large. The air is thick with dust. Every stomp of bare or booted feet kicks up clouds of it into the air. As the camera glides through the crowd, we see a layer of sand clinging to everyone. The sand is coating everyone's skin and sticking to their sweat-soaked clothes. It's as if the earth beneath their feet is trying to swallow them whole. The ravers look like a tribe of outcasts. Some dance with missing limbs. Others in patched, shredded clothing. Yet they seem free. The beat moves through them like a current. It syncs their bodies into one convulsing organism. Most of them look like they've stumbled out of a Mad Max film. Except for one man. He walks among them, out of place, out of sync. Clutched in his hands are flyers of his missing daughter. Behind him trails his son and a small puppy. The music keeps pulsing. He keeps searching. Six years after Viendra le feu (2019) won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize, Oliver Laxe returns with Sirat. Only this time, this co-production between Spain and Morocco is competing in the main competition. The film takes its name from the Sirat Bridge in Islamic tradition. According to tradition, the Sirat Bridge is a razor-thin path suspended over Hell that every soul must cross on the Day of Judgment. Only the righteous will make it safely to Paradise. It symbolises the ultimate test of morality. The film follows a father on a spiritual journey through the desert. The landscape becomes that bridge between life and death. We soon learn that he and his son have been searching for his missing daughter for five months. One of the ravers sympathizes with the old man. She tells him about another rave that is set to take place after this one. Only it'll take place much deeper in the desert. When he asks if she and her group are going there, they don't give him a clear answer. But he can sense it. That's where they're headed next. And maybe, just maybe, that's where his daughter is. Laxe uses 16mm film to capture their journey through hell. The grainy texture gives the images a psychedelic quality. In one hypnotic shot, the camera is fixed to the back of a moving truck facing the street. The ground seems to glide. Pebbles smear past in streaks. Then a single white line emerges, slicing the road in two. It holds steady for a moment, then breaks into dashes. The faster they move, the more abstract the road becomes. The old man and the ravers are taking a backroad to avoid the main one which is swamped with army vehicles and checkpoints. Not unlike the Sinai desert in Egypt. Soon, the journey gets harder. With no other route, they're forced to drive through the mountains. Laxe clearly nods to Sorcerer, William Friedkin's remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear. Like those films, Sirat becomes a battle between man and nature. But here, the desert is even more punishing than the Latin American jungle. Narrow dirt roads snake up the mountain. One wrong turn and it's all over. As if that weren't enough, the land is scattered with mines left behind from World War II. Every inch forward is a gamble. The suspense is relentless. There were long stretches where I found myself at the edge of my seat. One scene in particular left me in complete shock. I gasped and covered my mouth. It's an image I'll likely never forget. I doubt I'll see a more jaw-dropping moment at Cannes this year. I have a strong feeling this film will walk away with an award, possibly Best Actor for Sergi López. His performance is the emotional core of the film. If there's one aspect that left me wanting more, it's the ending. After such a gripping, visually arresting journey, the film's final moments felt slightly underwhelming. It doesn't quite deliver the emotional payoff you might expect from a story rooted in loss. But perhaps that's the point. Closure is not always granted, especially in the wake of devastation. Sirat operates as both a physical and metaphysical journey between grief and transcendence. Laxe constructs a cinematic odyssey through purgatory. By the time it ends, you're relieved. Not because it doesn't deliver, but because it leaves you physically and emotionally drained.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Sirat' Review: Oliver Laxe's Beguiling Film Is a Desert-Set, Techno-Infused Meditation on Death and Grief
At some point in Oliver Laxe's beguiling new film Sirat, a character asks a fellow traveler their thoughts on what the end of the world might feel like. The friend considers the question before responding, somewhat half-heartedly: 'It's been the end of the world for a long time.' This sentiment haunts Sirat, which seemingly takes place in a near-apocalyptic future and follows a group of ravers as they journey through the Moroccan desert in search of one last party. Home for this crew is a worn-out caravan, stocked with food, water and other provisions. Community is anyone they meet either at or on their way to dance parties. And on the occasion they turn on the radio, the news warns of escalating wars, depleting resources and a breakdown in diplomatic relations. The harshness of this world, conjured by Laxe with his signature painterly vision, feels a lot like our own. More from The Hollywood Reporter Planes, Trains and Everything's a Mess for Upfronts and Cannes Travelers at Newark Airport Colombia Is Thriving, But Locals Worry About Tariffs Luke Evans Joins Noomi Rapace in Thriller 'Traction' Premiering at Cannes in competition, Sirat marks Laxe's fourth time on the Croisette. His debut You Are All Captain earned him an award in Directors' Fortnight in 2010; he won a prize for his 2016 Critics' Week film Mimosas and another for the gorgeous Fire Will Come, which premiered in 2019 in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. Sirat is the director's first film in competition, a charged meditation on grief and possibility in a world edging toward collapse. It is a beautiful film (Pedro Almodóvar is a producer) filled with those unhurried landscape shots the director loves so much. But the movie's message can be punishing and oddly muddied at times. Working from a screenplay co-written with his usual collaborator Santiago Fillol, Laxe crafts a story about itinerant characters negotiating the realities of different losses — on both societal and interpersonal levels. The desert is the perfect setting for this reflection, as the arid location functions as both a repository for overwhelming feelings and a reminder of our own smallness in the grand scheme of things. The last few years of global history, marked by the twin forces of a viral pandemic and an accelerating climate crisis, have underscored a discomfort with death. In the United States, at least, collective mourning is not a part of the culture, and the idea of death is met with avoidance rather than affirmation. Laxe, a French-born filmmaker of Galician ancestry, has been steadily confronting that in each of his projects. Mimosas was framed around the delivery of a body to an ancestral resting place, and while Fire Will Come principally observed an arsonist recently released from prison, it also meditated on the idea of cultural extinction. Sirat begins and ends with different kinds of losses. The film opens with Luis (an excellent Sergi Lopez) and his son Esteban (Brúno Nuñez) searching the grounds of an outdoor rave for his daughter Mar. Laxe indulges in languorous shots of people dancing to techno, blasted from a set of large outdoor speakers, in a small pocket of the desert. Their bodies sway to the rhythmic thumps of the hypnotic music, composed by the French artist Kangding Ray. His score is complemented by Laia Casanova's stellar sound design, which turns the ambient noises of the desert into their own soundtrack. Laxe displays a considered understanding of the cathartic self-expression inherent to techno and raves specifically. The kind of experience now associated with out-of-touch thrill seekers at Burning Man adopts deeper meaning here. Luis and Esteban snake their way through this crowd, handing out flyers of Mar in hopes that someone has seen her. The pair eventually come upon a group who wonder if Mar might be at the next dance party. Driven by desperation, Luis and Esteban follow the two vans carrying Stef (Stefania Gadda), Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), Jade (Jade Oukid) and Bigui (Richard Bellamy) from this gathering to another one. At first, the veteran ravers try to get rid of Luis and Esteban, but the father and son duo are persistent. This journey of reluctant alliances at times reminded me of the one in Octavia Butler's novel Parable of the Sower, another work that deals with the forced itinerancy brought on by the end of the world. Sirat is at its most familiar as a Laxe-ian work in the middle, when this crew traverses the scorched landscape. Laxe revels in the beauty and imposing scale of the Sahara desert (where Sirat was filmed) with scenes of the cars rolling up steep mountains or getting lost in impromptu sand storms. The geographical isolation imbues the film with a haunting, almost otherworldly atmosphere. Ironically, Sirat gets muddled near the end. Although the last act is in many ways the liveliest — viewers will be jolted by a series of bleak twists — it's also where Laxe relinquishes narrative coherence in the service of making his metaphors more literal. The filmmaker leans into a sort of spectacle typically associated with genre works to wrestle with his theories about death as well as to actualize the film's title (which roughly translates to 'path' in Arabic), but his ideas — in part because of the sheer quantity — seem more embryonic here. There's also a dubiously judged scene in which more obviously racialized characters are used in a way that comes off as more aesthetic than meaningful. Despite these flaws, Sirat is an energizing film — a project determined to wake us up. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
Kuwait Times
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Kuwait Times
Ravers revel in Cannes spotlight with thumping ‘Sirat'
(From left) Spanish actor Sergi Lopez, Spanish actor Bruno Nunez, actor Joshua Liam Henderson, French-Spanish film director Oliver Laxe, French actress Jade Oukid, French actor Richard Bellamy, French actor Tonin Janvier and Italian actress Stefania Gadda arrive for the screening of the film "Sirat" at the 78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France.--AFP Real ravers picked from obscurity to act in Cannes festival hit 'Sirat' said they were delighted Friday to showcase their free-party world of drugs, trance music and travel. Set in Morocco and containing echoes of cult road movie 'Mad Max', genre-twisting 'Sirat' wowed many critics when it premiered on Thursday evening in the main competition. Franco-Spanish director Oliver Laxe, a fan of illegal raves himself, cast real people from the scene in leading roles alongside veteran Spanish actor Sergi Lopez, who is the lead. 'It was just incredible to be able to show who we are -- because this is the world we live in -- and to be able to express ourselves and show people that anything is possible,' Richard Bellamy told a press conference Friday. 'Listening to music, that's what makes us feel alive,' added the heavily tattooed Frenchman. 'It was an intense experience to be both a protagonist and completely lost in the world of cinema,' added co-star Jade Oukid, who plays herself. Featuring a soundtrack of hard trance and rumbling electronic music, film bible Variety said Sirat 'pummels us emotionally and psychologically in ways we can't predict'. The film starts with a vivid portrayal of a sweaty and sun-backed free-party in the Moroccan desert where Lopez's character Luis is searching desperately for his lost daughter. Laxe, who co-wrote the screenplay, said he had always liked the rave scene because of its tolerance and lack of pretension. 'I think that all human beings are a bit broken, we all have a fracture, an injury, but many of us create mechanisms to project an idealised image of ourselves,' he told reporters Friday. 'What I like about the travelling rave scene is the celebration of our injuries, of showing them,' he added. Two of his lead amateur actors, Bellamy and fellow Frenchman Tonin Janvier, both have physical disabilities. The title 'Sirat' means a hair-thin bridge that purportedly connects heaven and hell, the meaning of which becomes obvious at the film's dramatic climax. Grizzled Paris-born Laxe, who lived in Morocco for a decade, said he had purposefully mixed genres and broken some of the rules of cinema story-telling. 'Some people will be amazed, thrilled by the freedom with which we made it. And others won't get it.' Film magazine Screen was not entirely convinced, saying Laxe had maintained tension throughout 'although to frustratingly inconclusive effect and somewhat at the cost of conventional dramatic satisfaction'. It paid tribute to the cast, however, which projected 'a genuine sun-baked, grizzled sense of having knocked around'. German-language film 'The Sound of Falling' by Mascha Schilinski, a multi-generational drama set on a farm in northeast Germany, has emerged as an early critics' favourite in Cannes. The Palme d'Or award for best film, given to Oscar-winner 'Anora' by Sean Baker last year, will be handed out in a ceremony on Saturday May 24.--AFP
eNCA
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- eNCA
Ravers revel in Cannes spotlight with thumping 'Sirat'
Real ravers picked from obscurity to act in Cannes festival hit "Sirat" said they were delighted Friday to showcase their free-party world of drugs, trance music and travel. Set in Morocco and containing echoes of cult road movie "Mad Max", genre-twisting "Sirat" wowed many critics when it premiered on Thursday evening in the main competition. Franco-Spanish director Oliver Laxe, a fan of illegal raves himself, cast real people from the scene in leading roles alongside veteran Spanish actor Sergi Lopez, who is the lead. "It was just incredible to be able to show who we are -- because this is the world we live in -- and to be able to express ourselves and show people that anything is possible," Richard Bellamy told a press conference Friday. "Listening to music, that's what makes us feel alive," added the heavily tattooed Frenchman. "It was an intense experience to be both a protagonist and completely lost in the world of cinema," added co-star Jade Oukid, who plays herself. Featuring a soundtrack of hard trance and rumbling electronic music, film bible Variety said Sirat "pummels us emotionally and psychologically in ways we can't predict". The film starts with a vivid portrayal of a sweaty and sun-backed free-party in the Moroccan desert where Lopez's character Luis is searching desperately for his lost daughter. Laxe, who co-wrote the screenplay, said he had always liked the rave scene because of its tolerance and lack of pretension. "I think that all human beings are a bit broken, we all have a fracture, an injury, but many of us create mechanisms to project an idealised image of ourselves," he told reporters Friday. "What I like about the travelling rave scene is the celebration of our injuries, of showing them," he added. Two of his lead amateur actors, Bellamy and fellow Frenchman Tonin Janvier, both have physical disabilities. The title "Sirat" means a hair-thin bridge that purportedly connects heaven and hell, the meaning of which becomes obvious at the film's dramatic climax. - Grizzled - Paris-born Laxe, who lived in Morocco for a decade, said he had purposefully mixed genres and broken some of the rules of cinema story-telling. AFP | Sameer Al-Doumy "Some people will be amazed, thrilled by the freedom with which we made it. And others won't get it." Film magazine Screen was not entirely convinced, saying Laxe had maintained tension throughout "although to frustratingly inconclusive effect and somewhat at the cost of conventional dramatic satisfaction". It paid tribute to the cast, however, which projected "a genuine sun-baked, grizzled sense of having knocked around". German-language film "The Sound of Falling" by Mascha Schilinski, a multi-generational drama set on a farm in northeast Germany, has emerged as an early critics' favourite in Cannes. The Palme d'Or award for best film, given to Oscar-winner "Anora" by Sean Baker last year, will be handed out in a ceremony on Saturday May 24. By Adam Plowright
France 24
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
Ravers revel in Cannes spotlight with thumping 'Sirat'
Set in Morocco and containing echoes of cult road movie "Mad Max", genre-twisting "Sirat" wowed many critics when it premiered on Thursday evening in the main competition. Franco-Spanish director Oliver Laxe, a fan of illegal raves himself, cast real people from the scene in leading roles alongside veteran Spanish actor Sergi Lopez, who is the lead. "It was just incredible to be able to show who we are -- because this is the world we live in -- and to be able to express ourselves and show people that anything is possible," Richard Bellamy told a press conference Friday. "Listening to music, that's what makes us feel alive," added the heavily tattooed Frenchman. "It was an intense experience to be both a protagonist and completely lost in the world of cinema," added co-star Jade Oukid, who plays herself. Featuring a soundtrack of hard trance and rumbling electronic music, film bible Variety said Sirat "pummels us emotionally and psychologically in ways we can't predict". The film starts with a vivid portrayal of a sweaty and sun-backed free-party in the Moroccan desert where Lopez's character Luis is searching desperately for his lost daughter. Laxe, who co-wrote the screenplay, said he had always liked the rave scene because of its tolerance and lack of pretension. "I think that all human beings are a bit broken, we all have a fracture, an injury, but many of us create mechanisms to project an idealised image of ourselves," he told reporters Friday. "What I like about the travelling rave scene is the celebration of our injuries, of showing them," he added. Two of his lead amateur actors, Bellamy and fellow Frenchman Tonin Janvier, both have physical disabilities. The title "Sirat" means a hair-thin bridge that purportedly connects heaven and hell, the meaning of which becomes obvious at the film's dramatic climax. Grizzled Paris-born Laxe, who lived in Morocco for a decade, said he had purposefully mixed genres and broken some of the rules of cinema story-telling. "Some people will be amazed, thrilled by the freedom with which we made it. And others won't get it." Film magazine Screen was not entirely convinced, saying Laxe had maintained tension throughout "although to frustratingly inconclusive effect and somewhat at the cost of conventional dramatic satisfaction". It paid tribute to the cast, however, which projected "a genuine sun-baked, grizzled sense of having knocked around". German-language film "The Sound of Falling" by Mascha Schilinski, a multi-generational drama set on a farm in northeast Germany, has emerged as an early critics' favourite in Cannes. The Palme d'Or award for best film, given to Oscar-winner "Anora" by Sean Baker last year, will be handed out in a ceremony on Saturday May 24. © 2025 AFP
