Psychoanalysis, Sufism, Andrei Tarkovsky, the Rolling Stones: These are some of the influences that informed the creation of “Sirat,” perhaps the year’s least describable and most terrifying film. Since its premiere in May at Cannes, where it shared a jury prize, the movie has had critics name-checking such existential action classics as “The Wages of Fear,” “Sorcerer” and “Mad Max,” even as it goes to some shocking extremes all its own.
The film’s director, Oliver Laxe (pronounced LAH-shay), said he liked those comparisons. But Laxe, a 43-year-old Galician filmmaker, emphasized that “Sirat,” his fourth feature, was operating on a more metaphysical level. “I really wanted to make a film about death,” he explained on a video call from Tokyo, where he was showing the movie at a film festival.
“Sirat,” whose Arabic title can be translated as “the path,” follows a Spaniard, Luis (Sergi López), who, together with his young son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez), has traveled to Morocco in search of his missing adult daughter. She has vanished into the remote reaches of the nomadic rave scene. Hoping to find her as a mysterious military crackdown unfolds in the background, the father and son join up with five ravers who are ostensibly headed to another party across the Sahara. (The film is in theaters now for an Oscar-qualifying run and is Spain’s entry in the international feature category. It will return next year for a regular release.)
The perils — treacherous terrain, shortages of food and gas, unexpected dangers far from civilization — are many. López said in an interview that when he read the script and realized the level of anguish at which he would have to pitch his performance, he told Laxe, “I am not sure that there is an actor who can play that.”
But confronting fears, and mortality, is a crucial part of what “Sirat” is about. “It’s an absurd question, why someone dies,” Laxe said. “The important question, it’s, How do you die?” He said that “Sirat,” with its rave-going characters, speaks to that. It asks: “Can you imagine your death dancing?”
Other than López and Núñez, none of the principals, who share given names with their characters, were professional actors, and all brought unusual, off-the-grid experiences to the production. They were largely found through a street-casting process spearheaded by Laxe’s costume designer and former partner, Nadia Acimi, a devoted rave-goer herself.
Jade Oukid, 38, has been attending events like those in the movie for more than 20 years. She said that Acimi had found her in a crowd of 10,000 at a festival in Portugal. Oukid’s background is not easily summarized: She described herself as a photographer, an amateur filmmaker and a seamstress who works with vegan leather. She has lived in the woods and in trucks. When she met Laxe, Oukid said, she had just finished training in “intuitive animal communication.” And she belongs to collectives that organize music events and art shows.
Calling via video from her native France, Oukid spoke through an interpreter (as several cast members did), and said that she had initially been skeptical of taking part in “Sirat.” In addition to a fear of appearing on camera, she said that in rave culture there was a stigma about participating in outside projects. “A lot of the traditional media do portray us in a bad light,” Oukid said, “and they share information about our community that I don’t necessarily agree with.” And mindful of her Turkish-Algerian roots, she also worried about the colonial implications of visiting North Africa to film.
In his everyday life, Tonin Janvier, 42, also from France, performs at municipal street festivals, having grown up “on the boards,” he said, in a traveling theater family. He said his knowledge of raves wasn’t as relevant as his familiarity with Africa: As a child, he toured in Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Guinea. As an adult, trying to make ends meet as an artist, he spent six years selling old French vehicles in Mali and Senegal. “I’ve been through things that were even more perilous than in the film, and yet I’ve made it,” he said, noting the time he was riding a motorcycle and was hit by a truck that rolled over him. “I’m still alive — I do have a leg missing — but I’m still here.”
Stefania Gadda, a 50-year-old Italian, said that “alternative” was the best word for her lifestyle. “I live in the fields,” she said, “and I feel I’m more of a peasant than I am a raver.” She gets by without electricity or running water on a ranch near Granada, Spain, but a friend set up a video call at his house for our conversation.
Laxe found Gadda and another cast member in Órgiva, a Spanish town known for its countercultural currents. “The area where I live is an area where there’s a lot of people that do rave parties and rave festivals,” Gadda said. She was hired for “Sirat” after the casting team, on the recommendation of local residents, turned up at her house. “When the universe comes to your own home and knocks on your own door, you cannot say no,” she said.
Laxe said that all of the nonprofessional actors were initially scared of the camera, and, because the filming would be technically complicated, he had to build up their confidence. He invited López and other cast members to spend time living at his home in Galicia, in northwestern Spain. López fondly recalled cooking with the group, taking walks, rehearsing and “little by little” becoming friends.
Janvier, citing a desire for rigor in his preparation, found the ice-breaking frustrating. “The others had no discipline,” he said. “They would go to bed late; they would drink a lot. So I had a really hard time with them.”
Nevertheless, he has heard that viewers really do perceive them as a family onscreen. He attributes some of that credibility to the circumstances of the shoot, which took place in Morocco and Spain. “The wind? That was a real storm, that was real wind, so they put it in the film,” he said, noting, “I thought it added reality to our characters to be in those harsh conditions.”
Some of the most difficult aspects of the shoot had little to do with the terrain. For the opening sequence, shot in Spain, Laxe and his crew set up a three-day rave, which proved to be logistically complicated because it mixed the illusion of illegal partying with production necessities like insurance.
Then there is a scene in the film so horrifying — “a haunted scene,” Laxe called it — that the director said that he could never not be troubled by it, “even writing it, even editing it, even working on the sound.”
Laxe said the scene wasn’t meant to be shocking for shock’s sake. “I don’t have any interest to play with the spectator — these sadistic, cruel intentions,” he said. “I don’t like these kinds of filmmakers, Lars von Trier, Haneke.”
Instead, he said, even though he still finds the scene painful to watch, “I think it’s a healthy film.” He views the sequence as necessary — a way of breaking through to a different level of perception and emotion for viewers, almost the way a psychotherapist would try to do.
Financiers told him the moment was risky, but Laxe was convinced that he had to jump into the abyss. “It was like, We believe in what we are doing — let’s make the film even if it’s the last one,” he said.
On the contrary, “Sirat” seems closer to a commercial breakthrough for a director whose previous movies (“Mimosas,” “Fire Will Come”) were largely seen by hard-core cinephiles. “Everybody talks about the film,” he said, even people who don’t like it. And, he added, even people who aren’t fans of techno love the music.
“If we are not nominated for best soundtrack, something doesn’t work well,” he said.
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