Talk

“Post-existenzialism or spiritual journey – Oliver Laxe in an insightful conversation on his masterpiece SIRĀT“

Oliver Laxe talks about cinema the way others talk about ritual. The cinema is more like “a temple” than a site of leisure. He speaks in riddles when he folds together Gestalt psychotherapy, Sufi mysticism, rave culture, and the power of images on the body in a single breath. He returns, again and again, to the idea of cinema as an embodied experience rather than a purely intellectual one. That philosophy animates Sirât, Laxe’s latest feature and his most confrontational to date. Set between a near-apocalyptic desert landscape and an underground rave, the film unfolds like a trial by fire, pushing viewers toward ecstasy, grief and exhaustion. The result has proved galvanizing: Sirât won the Jury Prize at Cannes and recently received an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature. Laxe sat down with us to discuss his new film, cinema’s healing potential, and what a rave has in common with cinema.

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ZACH SEELY: Hi, Oliver. How are you? 

OLIVER LAXE: Good. A little bit of jet lag. Happy to be here.

SEELY: So Sirât is resonating with audiences in a rare way right now. What about your filmmaking practice made this film strike such a chord?

LAXE: First, because I protect the life in my images. The first images of this film, I had them 15 years ago. I was dancing with these images on the dance floor. I protected them from then until now. Cinema is so difficult and the creative process so long that, through scriptwriting and reshoots, filmmakers end up tiring of the initial image. When the film arrives at the editing table, the images are tired. They are dead, in a way. My images still have all the layers: the symbolism, the collective archetypes, the sensoriality. So that’s first.

Secondly, I’m studying Gestalt psychotherapy. I’ve been interested in psychotherapy with LSD and ayahuasca for a long time. So in a way, what the film does is what in psychotherapy we try to do. We have the same result—the psychotherapist tries to suspend this level of perception, the mind, so that feelings, wounds, and other levels of perception can emerge. At the same time, I have my practice in Sufism. So in a way, art is about proportions, as you know, and the geometry of images can have baraka. And I think this film has baraka. It’s a kind of white sorcery. It inhabits the film on the purest dimension of the image, on the formal dimension. There is something—a kind of strange proportion—in these images that penetrates the metabolism, the body of spectators.

At the same time, the film is very essential. I mean, we are talking about a father. It’s easy to identify with. We are talking about family, about death. These are collective archetypes. These are things that all of us are associated with. And I think the film, in a way, it interprets us. And finally, I can say that in this time of ChatGPT filmmaking, in this time where filmmakers calculate everything, where they don’t want to jump into the abyss—when you see someone who is really crazy, that’s refreshing. People are tired of watching the same films. Even many films at Cannes [this year], we already saw them. I’m not defending originality. I don’t think we have to be original. But the questions we have today are different, so the work has to be different. [Pier Paolo] Pasolini said that what spectators savor most is the freedom of the author, in a sacred way. That’s what they take from art: the freedom of the guy who did it. I won’t say I was free while making this film. I have ego, I’m ambitious, I have fears. But these fears didn’t hide my essence. My essence is strong, too.

SEELY: I read before that you’ve said the film is like a ceremony. 

LAXE: This film is not only a film, it is a ceremony. It obliges you to look inside, which is something we don’t usually do. There is so much pain inside us, and in the world we live in, that we distract ourselves all the time. And it’s normal that we cannot be connected with pain all the time. So this film obliges you to look inside. This is violent, and it’s healthy. It’s like someone is beating you. The master is beating you with the stick. The film is moving something inside, touching something inside. And as an author, I’m really satisfied with this.

SEELY: You’ve also talked about raves as a kind of ceremony. Is the film working in a similar way?

LAXE: For me, a rave was a place where I was connecting myself with my strength and my fragility. It’s a contradiction, but that’s what happens on a dance floor. When we dance, the body has a memory of wounds. So a dance floor is a place to look inside. When I was dancing with these images, I was also celebrating my wounds. So in a way, this film is about wounded people, it’s about humanity. We are all broken—I don’t say this with dramatism. From a psychological perspective and a spiritual perspective, we are broken hearts. Dancing is not selfish. You can be connected to the pain of the world and still celebrate life. So yes, I think that when people watch Sirât, their bodies are a place for catharsis. It’s a film that works with the body, and the body reacts to the film. 

Cinema is a place for catharsis. Like the Greeks, they didn’t go to the theater to have fun. They were going to purge, to clean, to protect society from itself. I think cinema can cure the collective imaginary in that sense. We can connect with this wound that all of us have. That is a healthy thing. We have to die before dying, I think.

SEELY: The film’s title comes from the Islamic concept of a bridge from hell to heaven that is as thin as a strand of hair and as sharp as a sword. Is the film theological?

LAXE: I mean, I’m a religious man. I’m a religious human being. So obviously there is a reflection of this in the film. I mean, I’m someone who has faith. And what does that mean? When they asked [Carl] Jung, “Do you believe in god?” he said, “I don’t believe in god. I knowgod.” So in a way, faith is a feeling. You feel that everything is in the right place. You feel that there is not a leaf that moves without a perfect reason. Even when life pushes you to the edge of the abyss, even when life confronts you with the most painful things, like in Sirât, it’s for a good reason. Life is taking care of you. So I don’t know if this is theological. This crossing of hell exists in all cultures, in the base of all our traditions. If you want to transcend, you have to connect with your shit, with your shadow, with your wound. You have to cross. It’s said in many traditions: if god loves you, he breaks you. He, how can I say, breaks you, right? 

SEELY: Yeah, breaks you. Have you always been spiritual?

LAXE: Since I was a kid, and this is really related to my psychology. I had to build a kind of parallel dimension. I saw pictures of myself recently as a child. I never look at the camera. I’m playing. I’m on my own. I’m making films, we can say. In a way this is neurotic, but it’s essential too. It’s connected with my ego, but also with my essence. Art was the way I developed my spirituality at the beginning. When I was a teenager watching films, those were the first moments when I felt I had a soul. And obviously when you’re a kid, you dream a lot. I had very ecstatic dreams. They reminded me that being a human being is a very complex and magical thing.

SEELY: Right. So, this film is set in the desert—

LAXE: My parents are workers. They don’t have any religious sensitivity or spiritual practice. They are sons of peasants. They come from the countryside. So in a way, when you live in nature, you develop a kind of humility. My practice is to become zero. In Sufism, we say that we are nothing. Being from a family of peasants is something you experience every day. Life tells you that you are small every day—and it’s okay. I don’t think people in the countryside have more anguish. I think it’s the opposite. We have more serenity. It’s natural for human beings to feel small.

SEELY: Right, so why the desert? Deserts are often spiritual testing grounds. 

LAXE: Why nature could be the real question. Why do I shoot all my films in nature?  I mean, I don’t have anything about cities. Nature is not just a beautiful frame. Nature speaks. The desert speaks. The desert is testing you. It’s taking care of you while testing you. Nature has rules. What [Andrie] Tarkovsky evokes in Stalker, for me, is reality. Even in a city, reality is a manifestation of something alive. There is a creative intelligence behind everything. There is a subtle world behind the material world. The desert is a place where you can’t hide yourself. You can’t be distracted. You are obliged to look inside. You know you can die there; you are connected with death. So your senses, your level of perception, are very awake. Even when we were at the door of the desert making the film—because when you make a film you are, in a way, protected—art is about crossing limits. Rave culture is about crossing limits. Spirituality is also about crossing limits. Love and craziness are closer than we think.

SEELY: The rave sequence feels very real in the desert. How did you achieve that?

LAXE: I like reality. When you make a film, you want to dialogue with your time, with your society, with your generation. With my screenwriter, Santiago Fillol, we wanted to make, in a way, the Easy Rider of our time. I spent a lot of time in rave culture. I’m not a raver; I’m an artist. But we worked with very respected crews. At the beginning, they were skeptical. Television always caricatures them. But when they saw my films, they trusted us. We organized a real rave. Everyone knew they were being filmed. The music didn’t stop for days. At some point, I felt we had enough images.

SEELY: On the music, your collaboration with Kangding Ray is incredible. I’ve listened to the soundtrack many times. What was actually playing at the rave? What came first: the music or the filming? 

LAXE: I first danced with the images. From the beginning, the creative process was connected with electronic music. I write atmospheric scripts. I always add links to music. But I didn’t want a composer. Sometimes composition underlines feelings, narrates things. I wanted something that evokes. David [Letellier, aka Kangding Ray] was perfect. We worked together for more than a year before shooting. We talked a lot, we listened a lot, we exchanged a lot of music. I’m a filmmaker of images. When I think in images, I speak about grain, texture, rhythm, tempo, color. In a way, David is a filmmaker and I’m a musician. We created music you can watch and images you can hear.

SEELY: I want to ask you about the end of the world. I don’t…

LAXE: We’re not at the end of the world. I don’t care much about that idea. Everything is well-written. The script of life is well-written, even when it’s painful. We are in a changing era. When an era changes, it’s not like a door—it’s a fade, two eras overlapping. That’s why sometimes the past appears inside the future. This world is dying, and it will pass. Life will push us to the edge of the abyss, and we will be obliged to change. We’re all on the same train at the end of Sirât. All human beings, we are all wounded. But this can make us more human. Cinema is a mirror. Everyone sees something depending on who they are.

SEELY: So what’s next?

LAXE: I’m living in the radical present. I’m very happy to share the film. The film is still talking to me. I have ideas and I don’t have ideas. I have images for another film. It might start in the Stone Age and finish today. It will cross civilizations, times, places. It will be about pain and the origin of pain. I’m thinking a lot about cinema as a place for therapy, as a temple. We’ll see what I do, but I’m really excited. For the first time, I had time to shoot. My previous films were very underground. Now I think I have a golden bullet in my gun.