“Sirât”, an interview with director Óliver Laxe

Spanish director Óliver Laxe paid his fourth visit to the Cannes Film Festival with his fourth feature film, “Sirât”, this time in competition, where this superb work ended up winning the Jury Prize (as well as the Cannes Soundtrack Award, a special mention for the Prix des Cinémas Art et Essai, and the Palm Dog). We met and talked about ravers, pure sound, trucks, shooting in the desert, the author as an archer. Laxe, who describes his film as “a communion of mutilated people”, but also people who have divested themselves of the idealised image of ourselves we wear as a mask and on the contrary, openly show their scars, also underlines that there is growth in the journey of his main character, Luis (played by Sergi López), even if this growth needs to be brought about by a crisis. The director of “You All Are Captains” (2010), “Mimosas” (2016), and “Fire Will Come” (2019), also insists on the realistic, even slightly utopian aspect of “Sirât”, for the love he has for the people and the landscapes he films, for the hope placed in the imminent reset it invokes, and because it provokes something that hopefully takes the viewer beyond the material world…