Desert rave film Sirāt arrives in UK cinemas after Cannes success

The 2025 Cannes prize-winning arthouse film Sirāt, blending rave culture, spirituality and existential storytelling, is set for release in UK cinemas later this month.

Sirāt, directed by French-born Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe, opens with a desert rave in southern Morocco where real-life ravers —many of them lifelong participants who travelled from across Europe— appear on screen, including DJ Sebastian Vaughan, AKA 69db, a member of the pioneering British free party collective Spiral Tribe.

As reported by The Guardian, Oliver Laxe deliberately blurred the boundary between documentary realism and fiction, working closely with rave communities during production. “In film, reality is usually made to adapt to the rules of cinema,” the director said. “But we do the opposite: we adapt cinema to reality.” When discussing the depiction of rave culture, he added: “they told us that the music cannot stop for three days. And we were really pleased with this idea”.

The film, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes last May, is positioned as a potential crossover arthouse success and has been shortlisted in five Oscar categories, including best international feature film. While its narrative follows a father, his son and their dog searching for a missing daughter amid the outbreak of armed conflict near a desert festival, rave culture gradually becomes the film’s central theme.

Unlike earlier films exploring dance music scenes, Sirāt frames raving as a confrontation with mortality and identity. “If you die on a dancefloor, it’s considered a mythological death,” Laxe said, linking the experience to spiritual transformation and the dissolution of ego.

The director draws on Sufi philosophy, Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey and the poetry of Rumi, presenting dance and psychedelia as rites of transcendence. “This is the same in all the core of all the cultures, where the hero transcends the idea of his own death,” he said. “He knows that his death is not the end of anything, it’s the door to eternity. It’s like a triumphant death.” Reflecting on the emotional arc of the film, Laxe added: “As a film-maker, I would like to evoke transcendence,” and “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 like this. It’s painful at some point, but I think there is serenity.”

A defining element of Sirāt is its score by Berlin-based electronic producer David Letellier, known as Kangding Ray, whose work spans experimental label Raster-Noton and regular DJ sets at Berghain and Tresor. Letellier described contemporary electronic music as having shifted away from its underground roots. He said it had been “co-opted by big corporations” and that what is often overlooked today is “the solidarity, the resistance, the anti-authoritarian, anti-system ethos that was once its base”.

For the soundtrack, Kangding Ray approached composition as a physical process rather than a traditional musical one. “I take sounds and I carve them and I polish them or cut them or destroy them or explode them,” he said, describing a score that gradually dissolves from visceral electronics into stark ambient textures.

In one of the film’s key moments, the father character finds solace in dancing amid personal devastation, underscored by a persistent techno pulse. Laxe described the emotional resonance of that scene: “The body has memory of the pain, of your pain, the child’s pain, the trauma of a child,” and “but also the pain of your lineage, your family, and the pain of the world.”

Premiering at Cannes on 15 May 2025 before opening in Spain on 6 June and France on 10 September, Sirāt will be released in UK cinemas on 27 February, with distribution secured mainly across Europe, North America and selected global territories. A dedicated MENA theatrical rollout has yet to be announced.

[Via The Guardian]