A conversation with director Oliver Laxe from the sensorial ‘Sirāt’

0:12Hello and welcome to the Monaco Weekly. I'm Fernando Augusto Pacheco and today I speak with director Oliver Laxe about his ecstatic Sirat, nominated for two Oscars, including Best International feature and best sound. The film delves deep into the underground electronic music and rave scene in the deserts of southern Morocco, where a father is looking for his disappearing daughter. It's a film to be seen on a big screen for sure, one of the best of the year. Here is my conversation with Oliver.

0:57You know this girl? It's me. Oliver, my first question to you. First of all, I love the film so much. The landscape is the first thing that caught my eye in the film. And I've been reading, you had some sort of a relationship with that landscape already. Did you live in Morocco, no?

1:18Oliver Laxe:I lived 10 years in Morocco. And five of these 10 years I was in the South. I was in a palm grove called Skura and another agadist. I was in Aran Warsazat. That is where I was shooting Mimosas, my second feature. So I was really attracted by the landscape there. You have mountains. These mountains that are showing the wounds of the planet. You feel when you are in front of these mountains that you are contemplating the creation of the planet. And you feel small. You really feel you are nothing. I think it's the natural dimension of human being, you know, being nothing, being a zero. It's the healthy one.

2:09At the beginning you are in a kind of existentialism, you know, in this landscape. You ask yourself about you and about your death.

2:17Oliver Laxe:You feel you are nothing again. And after this desert, and the desert, you know, after these existentialist questions, the desert has the answer. And the answer is just surrender. Just accept. Immerse yourself. Immerse yourself, look inside. You know, on a desert it's impossible to distract yourself. You are looking inside all the time. Or you are looking to the sky. In a way it's the same thing. I did three of my four films in Morocco. There's a strong relationship there. What about when you talk about rave? I've never seen rave scenes like this in cinema. Sometimes you see a film, it can even feel a little bit fake, but I think there's something quite spiritual, the way it's portrayed in Sirat, in my opinion.

3:11Yes, ravers, they have a memory in their bodies of something that we were doing human beings for thousands and thousands of years.

3:19Oliver Laxe:That is praying with the bodies, that is having a space, a dance floor, that is a ritualistic space. When you dance in community, you connect with your wound. You connect with your strength and with your fragility. So the body is giving you a lot of information about yourself. you are healing when you dance. It's like on a cinema, I think, you know, on a dance floor you don't know the people around you, you don't see them, like when you are sitting watching a film, but there is something that is happening, sadly and secretly, between the bodies. And yes, for me it's necessary to dance, it's a film that I danced since the beginning, I was writing the script, dancing, and I think that we have to celebrate, even if we are in a moment really particular in the history we are in a kind of sunset or a kind of change eras I think we have to keep dancing I think this is what I learned about rave culture cry scream, fall on the floor but stand up and dance, never stop to dance beautiful, beautiful message what about, I mean the music is essential for a film like this, and, you know, of course, the soundtrack by Kang Ding Ray.

4:45Tell us, how did you actually found out about the music? Were you a fan before? And when you were thinking about making Sirat, was it always kind of connected with the name of Kang Ding Ray?

4:56Oliver Laxe:I started to write in this project in 2013 after doing a trip in Senegal and Mauritania. So I had the first images of these tracks crossing the desert, And as I said, I started to dance these images. So the music or sound was related with these images since the beginning. And after, when I was writing the script with Santiago Fijol, the way we write is really atmospheric. And music, our atmospheres, is atmospheric too. So always I write, listen in music, and I was putting on the script like links from music, you know. and a few of these links were from Candon Ray Are you a musician as well? I'm not a musician but I discovered working with Candon Ray that I have a lot of musical sensitivity by the way my previous film Faye Will Come also won best soundtrack in Cannes in Accent à Regarde so I will say that more than a musician or more than a filmmaker I'm a sculptor and David too Candon Ray too We were working with the more structural layer of sound and image.

6:14When we talk about images and sound, we use the same words. Rhythm, texture, grain. We were shooting in 60mm. Distortion, brilliance, tempo. That's the thing in Sirat. You don't know where the image ends and where the sound starts. It's really a film where you hear the images and you watch the sound.

6:42Oliver Laxe:We really built a sound landscape. So I did a casting of musicians and Kandine was the best. I really thought that he could make this trip that we wanted. This film is about physical adventure that is at the same time a metaphysical adventure. A spectator dies watching this film. He's obliged, he's forced to look inside. That is something that we never do. So at some point, the dissolution of the music, the dissolution of the landscape, the dissolution of the recit helps you to dissolve yourself, you know? To feel that you are going on another dimension, you know?

7:44you're talking about another dimension i know that a lot of the actors in the film they haven't acted before so it's been quite a non-traditional way of selecting your actors? Do you think perhaps they work for this film because you wanted that kind of transcendental this kind of very different atmosphere as well, no? Yeah, I wanted fragility. That's what I was learning last year, you know. I'm someone really, I'm an artist, I'm idealizing reality all the time. I'm escaping from reality all the time. I'm building another reality all the time. And this creative process was a process where I had to connect more with my fragility through the dance floors and the free parties and through a creative process where I was connecting with my wound you know I'm studying psychotherapy gestalt too and I think we think that we all of us are broken and

8:48Oliver Laxe:it's necessary to celebrate this break, can I say? This wound, you know? And I see that people who are Seurat, you know, they feel this wound. They feel this... The film is really sorcery. It's really inhabited. Most of the films today, they are films of ideas. But there is no concrete between the ideas. these films doesn't they come from intention they don't come from images they don't come from the guts and Sirat it comes from the guts literally the explosion scenes as well it's raw, it's shocking Sirat is shock therapy it's LSD therapy Sirat suspends your brain suspends your rationality and invites you to surrender at some point you are disconnected from the brain and you are just like being kidnapped by the images by the film you are like on a current of you know obviously there are spectators who don't surrender you know they're keeping their head you know but yeah it's shock therapy yeah and Oliver just finally I think perhaps the world needed that in a way we're talking that we're in this kind of sunset phase but the film is doing very well among the public all the awards has been shortlisted for the Oscars.

10:28Do you feel in a way quite happy as well because it is not your more straightforward let's say Oscar film in that sense do you feel that perhaps there were a desire for films like this in a way? I'm so happy because it was not easy for me to be legitimized by the film industry, you know, because I'm making a really sensorial cinema about images and we are living under this dictatorship of the plot of the ideas, you know what is your film about? Obviously I had no craft not the craft, I had not the experience I had not the money to so things with Sirat were like, but yes I reality is telling me you were right we are having the respect of the industry everybody knows how risky is to make a film like Sirat everybody knows that this is a film that was done in the 70s but today there is no radicality or there is no courage to make a film like this it's a kind of miracle and yes we are having the respect of the industry of a lot of good filmmakers and yes we are having a lot of information about the relation between cinema and therapy, cinema and spirituality, about the images and human body.

11:59It's really complex what is happening in a theatre.

12:02Oliver Laxe:It's another ritualistic place like a dance floor. What is happening between the images and the body of the spectator is something complex that we have to keep exploring.

12:32Thank you, Oliver. Sirat is out now in the US and in Europe and will be out in UK cinemas on the 27th of February. I'm Fernando Gusto Pacheco and this show was edited by Christy O 'Grady. Thank you for listening.