If you’ve been on the festival circuit this year, it’s likely you’ve heard about Sirât. The bold, tragic and unforgettable film by Spanish director Oliver Laxe was the winner of the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. And while it was collecting praise and laurels, composer Kangding Ray (aka David Lettelier) received the award for Best Original Score. People will, fairly, relate this to Mad Max: Fury Road, but it’s more apt to say this walks among other dour narratives like Wake In Fright, Valhalla Rising, and The Mosquito Coast.
A two-hour visual and auditory trance, Sirât is incredible. Laxe gives us a world full of grit and texture, and what it lacks in story, it more than makes up for in setting. Laxe succeeds in putting us among the wandering festival goers in search of…well…we don’t really know. And that’s the part that works so well. In most stories, there’s a “thing” that characters are looking for where the MacGuffin becomes the focus of the plot. But what if it’s two things that – hold on tight – it/they may not even be where the characters are headed??
It’s unclear what truly drives these people. You might say they are being drawn. But by what? Hope or music? Both or neither? At what point would you keep going, again, without any certainty, clear direction, or even a destination? Yet that’s what makes the simplicity of the story so brilliant. Laxe’s story lets your mind wander in ways likely similar to what the aimless characters are thinking and feeling. It can be expected from the first frame that these characters will lose everything and find nothing. Which is the whole point.
As such, Sirât becomes a metaphor for life. In this case, the title of the film is the name of the bridge over which every person must pass which is “thinner than a strand of hair and as sharp as the sharpest knife or sword.” Nothing is certain, and literally anything can happen to you, at any moment, with zero warning. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. In Sirât (spoiler), it’s mostly bad.
Yet that doesn’t put anyone off the nebulous course. What helps push our nerves to their limits is the soundscape. It’s a one-two punch of music and sound engineering that gets under our skin…but it also makes us bob our head, stomp our foot and throw a random arm in the air.
These auditory components become characters on this chaotic, hypnotic, and inescapable road trip. It’s so essential to the story you’ll feel like you’ve super-glued your ear to massive speakers for the entire runtime. So it is with that said that we were thrilled to speak to the majestic musical madman who helped this unlucky band of travelers have the absolute worst time possible in the desert. Cautionary tale? Sure. But, man, what wicked headspace to live in for those two hours. Enjoy our chat with Kangding Ray on this episode of The GoSeeTalk Podcast Experience!
