Sirât by Oliver Laxe: the review by Paolo Mereghetti

SIRÂT
Type: initiatory-metaphysical on the road
Direction: Oliver Laxe. With Sergi Lopez, Bruno Núñez Arjona, Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Henderson, Richjard «Bigui» Bellamy, Tonin Janvier

What is a man doing with a child at a rave in the middle of the Moroccan desert? The answer comes very quickly: he is looking for his eldest daughter, who disappeared five months earlier during one of these gatherings, organized against the wishes of the local authorities. In fact, they called in the police to stop the music and identify the participants.

So the father has no choice but to escape and tag along with five forty-year-olds, all stoned, who want to reach a new rave in Mauritania: maybe the daughter is there.

But the journey will pursue other ambitions, perhaps metaphorical, perhaps philosophical, forcing those who seem to want to escape from their “responsibilities” to face an experience that everyone hoped to avoid, the extreme one of death.

The title Siratin fact, is the name of a phantom “bridge” which in Islamic tradition should connect hell to paradise and so the journey soon turns into a kind of initiatory journey, where you can get lost without even realizing it. Ending for turn the film into an experience of atonement where the whim of fate counts more than our intentions. How he seems to want to take revenge on us.

For those looking for a cinema that connects with our ghosts.

THE TRAILER