On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at Sirāt.
Spanish filmmaker Óliver Laxe first imagined Sirāt as a singular vision in 2011. “I started with this idea of making a film in the desert with trucks driving fast through the sand,” he says. “I always start with images.”
At the time, Laxe was living in Morocco, a country to which he felt a deep connection. That became the ideal location for the film, about a father (Sergi López) who is searching for his missing daughter at a remote rave along with his young son (Bruno Núñez Arjona) and their dog. The family soon joins a group of ravers in a journey across the Sahara Desert, where surreal tragedy after surreal tragedy befalls them.
Laxe and his crew ultimately shot the film, which is nominated for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars, in Spain and Morocco, from May through July 2024—a particularly hot time to be in the desert. “Art is about going through the limit,” Laxe says. “That’s how I do my job. It has to be difficult to achieve beauty. In a tree, the good fruit are never in reach of your hand. You have to climb the tree and it’s risky to climb the tree, but you will have very good views from the top.”
Because Laxe had lived in Morocco for over a decade, he was familiar with the landscapes and languages. He found many of the locations himself, both in person and using Google Maps. The story shifts between the Sahara and the Atlas Mountains that border it to the north.
“These two spaces are perfect for Sirāt because in the mountains are a place for existentialism,” Laxe explains. “You ask yourself how small you are, about your mission in life. I mean, And the response to that existentialism is to surrender. The desert is a place for surrendering.”
For Laxe, making a film set in a specific place is a way of giving back. He’s against tourism for the sake of tourism and instead encourages people to seek out the locations from Sirāt as interested travelers. “It can’t just be about consuming places for Instagram,” he says. “That’s why I make films—to balance this craziness. When I’m shooting in these places I spend time there with the people.”
