“Sirât” in the cinema – nothing but dust

We look at people who, somewhere in the desert, screw together a loudspeaker system, put on switches, pushing the plugs in somewhere. Young and middle-aged people with tattoos and asymmetrical hairstyles dance for individually holding and move to swelling techno beats. It is a Raver community under the scorching sun in nowhere that we watch. They are a trunk, a tribe, techno nomad, and they have gathered here to hold a Dionysian ritual, to completely indulge in the sound of the electronic sounds. So at the beginning there is the intoxication, the self -resolution of the ego in music. We hear the booming bass, the stoically hammering beat. Wumms, Wumms, Wumms. Hypnotic music is the work of the French Techno-DJ Kangding Ray: a sound that will accompany us for the duration of the film sometimes gives it its immersive quality.

In the middle of it an older man with his little son. Both, we see that, do not belong here. They move rather unsettled and awkward through the dancing pack of outstanding freaks, look out, try to orient themselves. The gray -haired man, who recognizes the apparently intact world of the bourgeoisie, Luis, is looking for his daughter, who disappeared without a trace months ago and no longer came back and that she is somewhere here among the celebrations. Luis has Esteban with him, his maybe eight -year -old son. Both distribute handouts on which the portrait of the missing teenager can be seen.

Two worlds collapse here: Some search for forgetting in the frenzy, the others remember and cannot forget. Finally, Luis gets to know a few of the techno hippies that he learns that there will be another rave these days, somewhere in the desert, and that his daughter may be there.

The fact that something is wrong in this cosmos that the world has got out of joint becomes clear at the latest when the military suddenly comes in, the celebrating people encouraged and declared the rave over. There is talk of an emergency regulation: “All Europeans have to go to their vehicles and leave the country.”

But Luis does not follow the orders, but, together with his little son, joins his new acquaintance in the hope of finding the lost daughter with his mid-range van: those handful of dropouts that break up with her two-shaped trucks to the next rave. One of the dropouts is missing one hand, the left leg. Not excluded that the venoused bodies have to be read as an indication of the injured world in which we are. From now on, the heavy vehicles converted to motorhomes go through the North African wasteland for days and nights: over dusty levels, over rubble and through inhospitable rock and mountain landscapes, serpentines, dividing the barren supplies. It will be a trip to the unknown. And the sun is always burning in this barren, Mad-Max-like desert landscape, grumbling the bass, the beat rattles. When Luis one evening with one of the technical women who is currently busy repairing a loudspeaker box, in which the truck sits together and the sound quality of the damaged box complains, the woman replies to him: “You shouldn’t hear but dancing.” You should no longer be there, you should lose yourself in the sound, should merge with the rhythm, dissolve as in the LSD frenzy.

The sparse conversations that are held are the discussions of seekers and at the same time escaping the world. We don’t learn much about the world of world, but the little we experience is enough to know that it is not the best order for the planet: the radio reports troubling; There are some indications that the world is on the threshold of a World War; The gasoline is expensive and scarce; Even in the middle of the desert, military convoys are occasionally traveling. But you don’t know anything accurate. “Does the end of the world feel like this?” Asks one of the protagonists at night at night, and his next man answers: “No, the end of the world has been taking place for a long time.” You can dance to him, but death cannot be avoided.

As a spectator, you can no longer get rid of the impression over time that this trip leads deeper and deeper into the no man’s land.

“Sirât” is the fourth film by the French director and screenwriter Óliver Laxe. The film, which breaks at least one traditional convention in the course of the story he told and the viewer, which is easy to disturb, has one or the other shock moment, won the prize of the jury at the Film Festival in Cannes this year. Over long distances you have to understand it as a surreal road movie that accompanies our idiosyncratic protagonists through the desert on their trip. You drive, you are on the way, are always on the move. And as a spectator, over time you can’t get rid of the impression that this trip leads deeper and deeper into the no man’s land. At some point towards the end, we see Luis stalled in a scene through the desert colored by the sunlight. “There is nothing but dust here,” he will say resigned at the end of the scene.

The film is also a kind of dystopically charged contemporary western and an existential drama about life and death and the very thin line that separates one from the other. And the sometimes ruthless, swelling and decongestant humming, booming, booming and buzzing the soundtrack forms the acoustic counterpart to the sometimes tormenting event, which is told in the second half of the film. The film critic Jessica Kiang complained in the magazine “Variety”, the industry sheet of the US entertainment industry, that the director “emotionally and psychologically power” with his film. Although she managed to warn the viewers of looking at the film and at the same time to make a compliment to the director: “Not many films can trigger a escape instinct and captivate you at the same time.” After the end of the film, you also understand why the cinema operator therefore asks to play it in the cinema with a slightly increased volume.

»Sirât«, Frankreich/Spanien 2025. Regie: Óliver Laxe, Buch: Santiago Fillol, Óliver Laxe. MIT: Sergi López, Bruno Núñez, Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Henderson, Jade Oukid, Richard Bellamy. 115 min. Kinostart: 14. August.