A truly unforgettable mix of Scorcerer and Mad Max, while directed with a genuine vision of originality, Oliver Laxe’s desert rave thriller Sirāt deservedly picked up the Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. After a festival run of shock and acclaim, including being shortlisted in five categories for the 2026 Academy Awards (Best International Feature (Spain), Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Music (Original Score), and Best Sound), it’ll now arrive in theaters on February 6 following a qualifying run last year. Ahead of the release, the new trailer has arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “A father (Sergi López) and his son arrive at a rave deep in the mountains of southern Morocco. They’re searching for Mar – daughter and sister – who vanished months ago at one of these endless, sleepless parties. Surrounded by electronic music and a raw, unfamiliar sense of freedom, they hand out her photo again and again. Hope is fading but they push through and follow a group of ravers heading to one last party in the desert. As they venture deeper into the burning wilderness, the journey forces them to confront their own limits.”
Rory O’Connor said in his Cannes review, “For the French-Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe, a competition berth in Cannes has been a long time coming. Laxe was here in 2010 (You All Are Captains), 2016 (Mimosas), and 2019 (Fire Will Come) without once going home empty-handed, and he now rises to the occasion with Sirat, his grandest, most adventurous work yet: the kind of bold, auteurist arrival that seems to happen more here than any other festival. The story takes place in Morocco, which provided the backdrop of Laxe’s first two films, and follows a father searching for his daughter amidst the dust and drugs of an illegal rave scene in and around the Atlas Mountains. There’s a delicious touch of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore to that setup, but Sirat is more in the lineage of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, even Mad Max: a story about a ragtag group attempting to move some monstrous vehicles over a landscape so unforgiving it might actually be hell. If I see a better film in Cannes, it will have been a very good year.”
In a recent interview, Laxe told us, “I don’t know if I get the soul of my characters. That is my purpose, sure, but what I can get is their wounds, their trauma through image. When you can do this, you don’t need to develop a character the way a script-writing book might teach you. I don’t need to develop the trauma in words. My images do that because they’re alive, not dry; they evoke things. I’m interested in psychology. Personally, in my daily life, I’m studying Gestalt psychotherapy. I’m studying the different types of neurosis that human beings have. I’m always analyzing people from a psychological perspective. I think that image can transcend something psychological.”
See the trailer and poster below.
