As with Galician director Óliver Laxe's previous film, Fire Will Come, his latest effort, Sirāt, will screen at the BFI IMAX as part of the BFI London Film Festival, where it plays on Monday in the Dare strand. Following its outing on the UK's biggest screen, Sirāt will receive a second showing on Tuesday at the ICA. The fact that both Fire Will Come and Sirāt have been programmed in the IMAX says much about Laxe's films, which are immersive, transportive experiences. Yet this new work is quite a different beast from its predecessor: Fire Will Come exemplified slow cinema, whereas Sirāt possesses a tense, driving narrative.
In Sirāt, Sergi López delivers a knockout turn as Luis, a father desperately searching for his missing daughter, Mar. Luis' quest has taken him and his young son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), from their native Spain to southern Morocco, where they attend an outdoor rave in the hope of learning something about Mar's whereabouts. As the pair circulate through the party, handing out fliers and questioning indifferent attendees while blaring trance music hampers their efforts, the scene feels extremely familiar; it’s clear that everyone Luis approaches will barely glance at the photo before claiming never to have seen his daughter.
The missing person trope has been heavily overused in cinema, but here Laxe cleverly uses it to draw the viewer in. After Luis notices a group of five people sequestered from the rest of the partygoers, he decides to ask them about Mar. The answer is quite predictable, but there is mention of another rave that might be happening much deeper in the desert. The group seems rather guarded when Luis asks if they’ll be attending, and the current event is abruptly broken up by soldiers declaring a state of emergency. As all the vehicles line up, waiting to leave, the quintet flee the scene, and Luis, urged on by Esteban, follows them.
The father and son—accompanied by their very cute dog, Pipa—are in a small van that is not ideally equipped for the Moroccan desert, yet they generally manage to keep pace with the two much larger trucks as the caravan treks through increasingly inhospitable terrain. As Laxe builds this strange, isolated world, it becomes easy to forget about the absent Mar—and you soon realise that the hunt for her is little more than a MacGuffin. Shot on tactile Super 16mm stock, the shattering Sirāt is a quite brilliant piece of sensorial filmmaking, one punctuated by a couple of jaw-dropping moments that will shake you to your very core.
Darren Arnold
Images: Pyramide Films
