Recently shortlisted by the Academy and having won the Cannes Jury Prize, Sirat arrives at a moment when Spanish cinema continues to explore moral uncertainty with renewed confidence. Directed by Oliver Laxe, the film unfolds as a spiritual and emotional journey across the arid landscapes of southern Morocco, where belief, responsibility, and human fragility quietly collide. Set between desert plains, rocky mountains, and vast open horizons, the film situates its characters in a territory that feels both real and symbolic — a place where orientation is never guaranteed.

Sirat	Movie Details
Country	Spain
Year	2025
Genre	Drama
Runtime	115 min
Director	Oliver Laxe
Main Actors	Sergi López, Bruno Núñez

Rather than offering answers, Sirat asks the viewer to inhabit doubt — to walk alongside its characters as they search for meaning in a world stripped of certainties. The physical act of crossing these landscapes becomes inseparable from the inner journey they are forced to confront.

True to Laxe’s cinema, the film resists narrative urgency. It advances through observation, silence, and physical presence, allowing the terrain and the body to become narrative forces in their own right. Sirat is less a story than a passage — a movement through loss, memory, and the possibility of grace, shaped by exhaustion, repetition, and distance.

At its core, Sirat follows a father and son moving through the Moroccan desert after a personal tragedy. Their journey unfolds in the margins of a rave gathering, a nomadic community drawn together by electronic music, temporary rituals, and shared displacement. This context is not anecdotal: the rave functions as a parallel form of spirituality, a collective search for transcendence that contrasts — and sometimes overlaps — with the more intimate, fractured faith of the protagonists.

The electronic music is central to the film’s emotional architecture. Pulsating, repetitive, and deeply immersive, it accompanies much of the journey, dissolving the boundary between interior and exterior experience. The music does not merely underscore scenes; it envelops them, transforming walking into ritual, fatigue into trance, and landscape into vibration. In this sense, sound becomes another terrain to cross — one that connects bodies, time, and belief.

Visually, the film embraces austerity. Long takes, natural light, and wide compositions emphasize human vulnerability against overwhelming environments. The Moroccan landscape is not a backdrop but an active presence, mirroring the characters’ internal states. Dust, heat, wind, and distance shape both the physical and emotional rhythm of the film. Sound design remains restrained, often allowing footsteps, breathing, and the distant echo of music to replace dialogue, reinforcing the film’s contemplative tone.

Sergi López delivers a performance of remarkable restraint. His character carries emotional weight without verbalizing it, embodying grief as something lived rather than declared. The dynamic between father and son is defined by distance and unspoken tension, making their shared journey feel fragile, provisional — as if connection itself were something that could dissolve at any moment.

What distinguishes Sirat is its refusal of emotional manipulation. There is no catharsis imposed, no moral conclusion offered. Instead, the film operates in a space of ambiguity, where faith is neither affirmed nor denied, but tested through endurance, repetition, and bodily experience. Laxe treats spirituality as something intimate and uncertain, shaped as much by sound, movement, and landscape as by belief itself.

In the context of contemporary European cinema, Sirat stands as a quiet yet demanding work — one that values patience over plot and immersion over resolution. Its Academy shortlist recognition feels less like a validation of spectacle than an acknowledgment of cinema’s capacity for silence, physicality, and moral depth.

Sirat does not seek to guide the viewer toward answers. It invites them to walk, listen, and endure alongside uncertainty — and to consider what it means to keep moving forward when belief, like the landscape itself, feels vast, unstable, and unresolved.