LGM Film Club, Part 567: Sirāt

Directed by Oliver Laxe and released in 2025, Sirāt starts out as one thing but turns into something very, very different. A Spanish man and his son, who is about 11, are in Morocco. They are trying to find their daughter/sister, who has disappeared into the rave scene. So they go to a rave and hand out information about her. The film portrays a rave, with enormous speakers set up in the desert to do what raves do, which are not my thing, but who cares. The budget isn’t really big enough to make that as big as a real rave would be, but whatever, you do what you have to do. They meet some folks who are helpful, but that’s it. Then, the military breaks up the rave. It’s unclear why at first. There’s a “state of emergency,” whatever that means. They are supposed to leave in an orderly fashion. But the two vehicles with the helpful ravers break the line and drive off and the father follows them. They set across the Moroccan desert, heading south toward what is supposed to be another rave near the border of Mauritania.

So you think this is going to be a road trip where different people find community and then maybe they find the daughter at the end.

But that is not what this movie is. Halfway through the film, Saxe kills off the one character that any other director would not kill off. It’s sudden and horrifying. Then it isn’t some minor issue, but a full-fledged war has broken out. Now it’s people at the edges of the Earth, dealing with unspeakable grief in what is effectively a post-apocalyptic landscape. Deserts always are, as Mad Max showed so well. There’s no happy ending here. There’s just more violence, more desert, very little hope. And yet this while some people would recoil from parts of the film, not to mention dislike the rave music soundtrack, it’s really a fascinating film. It stars mostly ravers themselves, playing themselves, plus the Spanish actor Sergi Lopez as the father. And in the end, you build family out what you have around you, whether that’s your biological family or not. Worth a viewing at the very least.