‘The music can’t stop for three days’: How Sirat went on a road trip into the dark heart of rave | film

IIn the opening scene of Oliver Lax’s existential mystery thriller Sirat, a crowd of partygoers assemble a sound system to party in the southern Moroccan desert, where the film’s protagonists’ paths cross for the first time. Lax explains that the most important thing is that the revelers were not just ordinary extras. Most of them were devotees who had traveled their whole lives to attend the temporary festival from all over Europe. One of the DJs who played, Sebastian Vaughan AKA 69db, was a core member of Spiral Tribe, the pioneering British “free party” group of the 1990s.

“In film, reality is usually made to conform to the rules of cinema,” the French-born Spanish director told me when we met in Berlin. “But we do the opposite: we adapt cinema to reality.” While negotiating with the singers about how they could best be cast in the film, “they told us that the music couldn’t stop for three days. We were really happy with that idea,” he recalls.

Sirāt promises to be one of the best crossover songs of the year. After winning the Jury Prize at Cannes last May, it will be released in UK cinemas in February, and has a good chance of picking up an Oscar or two in March, having been shortlisted in five categories, including Best International Feature Film. On the surface, LAX is a road movie about a humble family — patriarch Luis, his son Esteban, and their dog Pepa — searching for their missing daughter, Mar. Their search becomes complicated when radio reports announce the outbreak of an armed conflict with the unnamed neighboring country, and the army arrives to break up the desert festival.

But over the course of the film’s nearly two hours, the plot of the search mission gradually fades into the background. Far from being merely an incidental backdrop, rave culture and its deeper metaphysical meaning emerge as a major theme of Sirat.

Several previous films have attempted to explore dance music culture, with varying degrees of success: the British coming-of-age drama Beats, Mia Hansen-Løve’s French tale Eden, or the Warsaw-set documentary All These Sleepless Nights. What distinguishes Sirat is that Lax sees delirium and the associated ego dissolution as a confrontation with mortality. “If you die on the dance floor, it’s considered a mythical death,” says the director, who observes Sufism and personally studies Gestalt psychotherapy.

The unusual way in which Lacks’ film depicted the deaths of some characters was key to his growing religious status. But he insists his intention is far from cruel. Rather, his depiction alludes to the spiritual practice of shedding worldly attachments or the false self to achieve true liberation. “This is the same at the core of all cultures, where the hero transcends the idea of ​​his own death,” says the director, referring to the work of scholar Joseph Campbell. “He knows that his death is not the end of anything, but rather the door to eternity. It is like a victorious death.” His film is his own take on the hero’s journey, a universal narrative model.

Rumi’s poetry was one of Lax’s many sources of inspiration. The 13th-century mystic awakened others to dance “When You’re Open” and “In Your Blood,” which inspired the film’s depiction of the use of raving and drugs as ecstatic rituals amid life’s suffering. “As a filmmaker, I like to evoke transcendence,” he explains, “even the worst disasters, tragedies, obstacles, the worst thing that can happen to you — it’s a gift, in a way. It has to be that way. It’s painful at some point, but I think there’s a serenity.”

Lax deliberately casts non-professional actors with disabilities — Tonin Janvier (“Tonin”) has a prosthetic leg, Richard Bellamy (“Bijoy”) has a missing hand, and others have visible scars — to highlight the emotional flaws of those seeking solace on the dance floor.

He says rave parties are unique in that they allow for unrestrained and even extreme forms of expression. “You can scream, cry, or fall to the ground,” he added. “At some point, you see yourself and you see your ego building, you see how fake you are, your personality, that’s not your essence. At that moment, the rhythm, the kick, the music comes in. It’s like it’s pushing you up. It’s like you’re celebrating your wounds when you go down.”

In the film, none of Lax’s spiritual musings would have come together without Sirat’s score. For this reason, the director enlisted the help of one of electronic music’s most respected producers, Berlin-based David Letelier, also known as Kangding Ray.

Letelier, a veteran musician on legendary experimental label Raster-Noton and a regular DJ at techno temples Berghain and Tresor, says he saw contemporary electronic music leaving behind its roots in DIY and weird subcultures to be “picked up by major labels” and turned into a lifestyle product through social media. What is now often taken for granted, he says, is “the solidarity, the resistance, the anti-authoritarian, anti-system spirit that was once its base.”

Laxe contacted Letellier after coming across his 2014 track Amber Decay, and spent five days with the producer in Berlin listening to everything from Steve Reich to Detroit techno. While composing Serrat’s score, Letelier retreated behind a huge wall of modular synths in his studio and spent days matching the sounds to the pain, despair and rage shown on screen.

He told me that his work on Seerat was not like that of a composer collecting musical notes but more like that of a sculptor. “I take sounds, sculpt them, polish them, cut them, destroy them, or blow them up,” he said. The end result is a soundtrack that seems to disintegrate over the course of the film, from visceral electronics to dark, skeletal ambient noise.

In the second half of the film, Louis, the father figure, faces sudden devastation in his life. As low-tech heartbeat drones in the background, he stares in resignation and raises his hands in the air. In a moment of crisis, he finds solace in dancing. “The body has a memory of pain, your pain, the child’s pain, the child’s trauma, but also the pain of your lineage, your family, the pain of the world,” Lax says.