Oscar-Nominated 'Sirāt' Finds Its Soul in the Sands and Summits of Morocco

For filmmaker Óliver Laxe, the Oscar-nominated 'Sirāt' began not with a script, but with a picture in his mind: trucks speeding across an endless desert. That initial vision, formed back in 2011, could only find its home in one place. 'It was always connected to Morocco,' Laxe says. The Spanish director, who lived there for twelve years, shot the film in the summer of 2024, tracing a father's desperate search for his daughter through remote raves and across the Sahara.

The production carved a path through extreme landscapes, from the red, symmetrical mountains of Rambla de Barrachina in Spain—where an opening rave was filmed—to the stark white sands of the Haroun desert near Erfoud, Morocco. A pivotal, tragic sequence unfolds on the Tagounsta road, a winding path built by the French Legion in the 1920s that Laxe discovered himself near Errachidia. 'The top of the mountain was unbelievable,' he recalls.

Laxe sees these locations as characters. The Atlas Mountains pose existential questions, he suggests, while the vast desert offers a form of surrender. His deep connection to Morocco, which he describes as a 'continuity' with his ancestral Galicia in Spain, informed every choice. He is wary of casual tourism, hoping the film might inspire thoughtful travel instead. 'A traveler is someone who doesn't have a home,' Laxe says. 'Everywhere is his home. He has a radical interest and curiosity in the other.' For him, filming there was an act of giving back, a way to balance what he calls the 'craziness' of consuming places for a photograph. The result is a film where the land itself shapes the story's spiritual journey.