Toronto – The smile is beatific, happy, even an impious hour in our zoom call from France. A week later, when I finally know the 43 -year -old filmmaker, Oliver Laxe in person in a private celebration in Toronto for his new movie “Sirât”, radiates Serenity. He is the happiest person (and perhaps the highest) in the room.
“One of the first ideas I had for this movie was a prayer of Nietzsche,” he says. “I will not believe in a God who does not dance.”
Laxe is going to Raves: “Free parties,” he clarifies, indicating the ones he needs to hear with mouth to mouth. It has been deeply thought of what they mean and what they do. “We still have a memory in our bodies of these ceremonies that we were doing for thousands of years, when we were making a kind of catharsis with our bodies.”
It is almost the opposite of what he expects to listen to the autumn festival circuit, when directors with great ideas do their cases for the importance of the art form. But the body, the return to something purely sensory, is the great idea of Lax.
Constantly, “Sirât” has become, since its debut in Cannes in May, a favorite growing: not only the dear of a critic but an obsession among those who have seen it. (The film will have a race that qualifies the awards in Los Angeles from November 14) A dance party in the desert at a time of Apocalypse, the film is something you feel, not resolved. His blows of EDM beats are delicious in his chest (provided that the theater speakers are up to it). And the explosions on the horizon shake the beats of the beats.
“I really trust the ability of the images to penetrate the metabolism of the spectator,” says Laxe. “I am like a masseuse. When you see my movies, sometimes you will want to kill me or you will feel the pain in your body, such as: Wow, what a delight. But later, you can feel the result.”
An image of the movie “Sirât”, directed by Oliver Laxe.
(Cannes Festival)
Laxe can talk about his influences: Cosmic epic by Russian teacher Andrei Tarkovsky or existential road films such as “Zabriskie Point” and “Blacktop two lanes”. But it is not a product of a typical postgraduate school trajectory. Rather, it is his escape from that way after growing in northern Spanish Galicia and studying in Barcelona (he tried London for a while) what is fascinating.
“It wasn't right,” he recalls. “I did not discover that I had a place in the industry or in Europe. I was not interested. I had bought a camera, a 16 -millimeter bolex, and I knew I was accepting that my role was to be a type of sniper that was working in the trenches but making really small movies.”
At the age of 24, Laxe moved to Tanguero, Morocco, where he would live for 12 years in a monastic elimination of the glamor of the films, collaborating with local children in his films. The experience would become his first feature film, “You are Ally Captains” of 2010, which finally led him to the award -winning podium in Cannes, as well as his second and third film, all of which occurred before “Sirât”, his room.
“Little by little, the things we were doing were the opening doors,” he says. “In a way, life said, telling me: this is your path.”
The road is what “Sirât” means in Arabic, often with a religious connotation, and its new film takes a unique trip, crossing the dance of its first scenes to the clues of a train that stares extend until the end of the line. There is also a search that leads us to the film: a father and a son who seek among the ravers to a missing daughter, potentially a wink to “The Searchers” or the “Hardcore” of Paul Schrader, but not a point of the plot that Laxe feels especially interested in exposing himself.
“Obviously I have a spiritual path and this path is about celebrating the crisis,” he says. “My path was through the crisis. It is the only time you connect with your essence. I just want to grow. That's why I get into the abyss.”
“My path was through the crisis,” says director Oliver Laxe of his constant ascent. “It is the only time you connect with your essence. I just want to grow.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Laxe tells me that he did not spend years perfecting a script or sharpening the dialogue. Rather, he took the images that stayed with him, trucks that accelerated in the dusty desert, fed by the rumble of their own speaker systems, and took them to the free festivities, where their cast merged on the dance floor.
“We were telling them that we were making 'Mad Max Zero',” he recalls, but also something “more metaphysical, more spiritual. Some of them already knew. There are videos of us explaining the film in the middle of the dance floor with all people dancing. I mean it was quite crazy. It's something that I would like to show movie schools.”
Filmed in Grungy Super 16, the production became deep in the steep and burning moors, both in Morocco and in Spain mountainous, where the crew would make fork twists along the sinuous roads of cliffs that would give fans of the legendary anxiety of “Horcerer” of 1977 of William Friedkin of 1977.
“It was my less dangerous film,” says Laxe, reminding me of his “Fire Will Come”, the 2019 incendiary thriller for which he launched real firefighters. “We were making the movie in the midst of the flames, so I don't know. I'm an addict to images and I need this drug.”
There is a Herzogian streak in the Barbudo Laxe, a courageous prophet in the savage that inspires its collaborators, in particular, Santiago Fillol, and the Techno Composer Kangding Ray, to make the leap of faith with him. But there also seems to be a point where talking about “Sirât” feels insufficient, instead of simply undergoing their sound blows, the family camaraderie found and (fair warning) moments of sudden loss that have even shaken the most resistant public.
“The film evokes this community of injured people,” he says. “I am not a sadistic guy who wants to suffer a spectator. I have many hopes. I trust humans, even with their contradictions and weaknesses.”
For those who want to find a political reading in the film, it is there for them, a parable about migration and fascism, but also the euphoria of a hurry of the head in the unknown. “Sirât” is giving a strange comfort in a cultural moment of uncertainty, a rare result for a low -budget art film.
Its visionary manufacturer knows exactly where it goes next.
“I received the message in Cannes,” says Laxe. “People want to feel the freedom of the filmmaker or the author. What they appreciate is that we jump from a fifth floor to make this movie. So, for the next one,”
Our connection is cut and is almost too perfect: a moment of cliffhanger of laxos in which ideas are torn by a lot of feelings. After several hours with the hope that this would be intentional on his part, the director really responds to me, apologizing. But until then, the mystery serves it well.
