“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…

On the overtly allegorical impact of the film

“What I like in adventure tales, and it’s an artistic tradition, it is that these tales have a physical dimension and ametaphysical one. The hero faces challenges, external challenges, there is an external epic, but there is also an inside journey. That allows me to always have these two dimensions, but it is something really fragile : one is well rooted – it’s the narrative –, but with the images and with the sound, and with the dematerialisation of the narrative, the dematerialisation of the sound and of the landscape – we’re going from the moutains to the desert –, the parallel dimension becomes more ethereal… We’re going from the language to the end of the language.”

On making not a dystopian film, but a realistic or even an idealistic one, and on awaiting the reset

“A few people thought my film was dystopian, but really, most people can feel that I love what I’m shooting – I mean I have faith in humanity, so it’s not a dystopian film, even if you see the worst situations in it… Hopefully it is not an idealisation. Hopefully, we are really in a moment of change, and this film offers a taste of this future… Us human beings, we want to change, but it’s not easy, we don’t have the tools… But life will do the work for us: it will force us to change. This is realistic, not dystopian! These ravers, they don’t listen to the radio because they already know that the end is coming, that a reset is coming, and they want that to happen soon, because we need a reset, it’s the only way… I do think this is a very stimulating moment we are living. It was worse when we were trusting this myth of progress.”

On transcending

“Art, when it really works, it transcends the author… There is nothing more disgusting than perceiving and understanding the intentions of the author…  [As a filmmaker], you commit a crime, but you try to erase the traces that are the intentions of the author.”

“I like when you push the viewer. I don’t know if I manage to do this, but there are, notoriously, filmmakers who make the viewer feel like beyond the material world, there is a certain world that vibrates, that is there, a manifestation that has rules, that speaks… but it’s a really fragile, in the sense that you cannot represent it, only capture it accidentally, almost.”

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