Films to Watch #15: Sirât (Oliver Laxe, 2025)

LAB111, Amsterdam
Meeting time: 18:30
Film starts: 18:40

For the 15th edition of Films to Watch, we’re going to LAB111 to see one of the most talked-about and unsettling films of the year: Sirât, the new film by Spanish director Oliver Laxe, finally arriving in Dutch cinemas.

Awarded the Jury Prize in Cannes and nominated for the Oscar for Best International Feature and Best Sound, Sirât is not just a film you watch — it’s a film you experience.

The story follows a father and his young son searching for their daughter/sister, who has disappeared into a nomadic rave community wandering through the Moroccan desert. What starts as a search slowly turns into something far deeper: a spiritual, apocalyptic, and deeply physical journey through sound, landscape, fear, and transcendence.

Laxe draws inspiration from Sufism and trance culture: dance as meditation, music as ritual, cinema as a sensory experience. The title Sirât refers to the bridge that, in Islamic tradition, every soul must cross over hell on Judgment Day to reach paradise — and that sense of walking a fragile line between worlds runs through every frame of the film.

With a powerful, vibrating techno score by Kangding Ray, mixed with wind, sandstorms, and desert silence, Sirât becomes pure sensory cinema: hypnotic, disturbing, beautiful, and impossible to reduce to a simple plot. It’s a film about loss, obsession, escape, danger — and about looking into the abyss while still searching for a way through.

This is bold, radical, and emotional filmmaking. Not comfortable. Not easy. But absolutely unforgettable.

### After the film

We’ll head to LAB111’s bar (still one of the best cinema bars in Amsterdam) for a drink and a relaxed chat about the film — to share impressions, argue about what we just saw, and try to put words on an experience that mostly works beyond words.

Come for the movie.
Stay for the conversation. 🎬🍷