CAST AGAINST THE unrelenting cruel majesty of the deserts of Morocco, Oliver Laxe’s film Sirât, could be the defining moment of this year’s European Film Festival in South Africa. It’s a tale in the here and now, conflating a music rave with an aggressive military presence, the fragility of life against the enormity of desert energy. You can see it at this year’s European Film Festival South Africa, where it screens in Johannesburg and Cape Town, 9-19 October 2025.

Almost Beckettian in the horrifying notion of trying to find someone amidst thousands of slightly stoned strangers, Sirât follows the journey of Luis (Sergi Lopez) and his small son, Esteban (Bruno Nunez Arjona) with their Jack Russell, Pipa. They’re seeking Mar, Esteban’s sister, Luis’s daughter, and they stand out amid a myriad of spaced-out twenty-somethings, enjoying the vibe that the massive speakers give them as they throw sound across the empty space, against the cliffs and into the sand.

The gesture is common: a picture of the missing girl in hand, Luis turns each face he can, toward that of his daughter. The heads shake in unison. But the grand narrative of this mesmerising and startling film, from which you will emerge a little shell-shocked, is not about Luis’s daughter. She’s an inroad to the vast complexity of being in the world. Sirat, in Muslim culture, is the tiny metaphorical bridge which expands over hell.

And then art imitates life, and a threatening military presence intervenes in the rave and Luis and his small car of loved ones follows the thread left by the rave organisers, perhaps to another rave, perhaps to infinity. It’s a story in which you quickly become embroiled in the connections offered between strangers at a time of great collective horror, and it is one with hairpin bends that will leave you feeling broken.

But the narrative threads reach deep and the film, obliquely casting an eye at the horror of contemporary violence at the end of time, speaks of human catastrophe rather than taking political sides. It’s imperative watching.

• Sirât is directed by Oliver Laxe and features a cast headed by Richard Bellamy, Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Herderson, Tonin Janvier, Sergi López, Bruno Núñez Arjona and Jade Oukid. Written by Santiago Fillol and Oliver Laxe, it is produced by Agustin Almodóvar, Pedro Almódovar, Domingo Corral, Oliver Laxe, Oriol Maymo, Mani Mortazavi, César Pardiñas, Andrea Queralt and Holger Stern and features creative input by Kangding Ray (composer) Mauro Herce (cinematography), Cristóbal Fernández (editing), Laia Ateca (production design) and Nadia Acimi (costumes). In Spanish and French with English subtitles, it is part of the 12^th European Film Festival in South Africa, screening at The Bioscope independent cinema in Milpark, Johannesburg, The Labia in Cape Town and Hyde Park NuMetro in Johannesburg, 9-19 October 2025.