Sirāt

Oliver Laxe's Sirāt arrived in 2025 and won three European Film Awards including Best Cinematography (Mauro Herce). Laxe, born in Paris to Galician parents and based for several years in Morocco, made the film in Atlas Mountain villages where he had been living. It is his fourth feature, after You All Are Captains, Mimosas and Fire Will Come, and confirms him as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European auteur cinema.

A Spanish father (Sergi López, in a performance entirely without actorly artifice) travels to Morocco to find his daughter, last seen attending an all-night desert rave near the foot of the Atlas. What begins as a missing-person procedural slowly becomes something stranger, a journey in which the rave culture of European travellers, the Moroccan villagers whose lands are crossed, and a desert that operates on its own logic combine into a metaphysical search. The Arabic word sirāt refers to the bridge over hell described in Islamic eschatology (narrower than a hair, sharper than a sword.

Herce's photography moves between dust-choked daylight and the strobing electronics of the rave, and the film's sound design) credited as a separate authorial achievement, is among the most carefully built of recent festival cinema. Laxe is part of a Spanish-Moroccan-Galician filmmaking sensibility (alongside Lois Patiño and Pedro Costa's late-career interlocutors) that is reshaping European art cinema's geography.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most genuinely strange European film of 2025, and a work that earns its metaphysical reach. A reminder that cinema's frontiers are still being pushed at the edges of the continent.