In that sense, we’re all a bit like Luis: ordinary people, living rather anonymous and unremarkable lives. We’ve spent our days in the comfort of a world that keeps death at arm’s length, and perhaps because of that, we often live numbed, disconnected from our deeper truths. But life works differently — it bursts in, shakes us awake, and asks us if we’re sure about the path we’re on, if we’re truly heading where we think we are.

So yes, Sirât is a tough film. But it’s a necessary and affirming toughness. What happens to these characters pushes them to grow — it opens up a new horizon for them. That brutal, merciless rock-bottom forces them to confront themselves, with nothing left to lose. Fear disappears. Their egos are stripped bare by what they’ve been through. They’re ready to walk through the mines, to learn how to dance with eternity.

We live in a deeply thanatophobic society — one that has expelled death from its very core. Even the most fundamental rituals that once helped us process and integrate death into life have been outsourced to institutions that now carry them out for us. So how do we reconnect with death in a world like ours? How do we embrace the hard wisdom it offers? These are questions I ask myself constantly, and I believe cinema is one of the few spaces left where we can still experience these things — things that society has been avoiding and making invisible. I hope Sirât stirs something within us, and helps us look inward.

In my film, all the characters — especially Luis — are forced to face death. They look it directly in the eye. In Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami confronted death so directly that he ended up giving us a hymn to life. That dialectic has been a central inspiration for me here. So yes, Sirât is a film about death. But above all, it’s a film about life — about survival after having touched the deepest depths.

What lies at the heart of that pain, in the middle of this descent into darkness? Humanity. Fragile characters who recognize their smallness in a world where something far greater looms. Characters who, after initial mistrust, begin to care for each other — without judgment — in a communion of scars. A communion of the wounded.

We’re all broken, in some way. Most of us develop strategies to hide that original wound. What I admire about ravers is that they wear their wounds openly, unflinchingly. Making this film has, without a doubt, been an extreme journey for me. It’s allowed me to engage with my own inner wound.

“Grace is found especially among the excluded,” said Saint Francis of Assisi. Rumi said that broken hearts are the most beautiful, because “that’s how the light gets in.” There’s something deeply moving about the fragility of an inexperienced actor — that vulnerability. It’s a precious energy, one I personally relate to. And it’s something that’s very hard to achieve with trained actors, no matter how “lost” they may appear. I care about people — whether or not they have experience acting. But the fall Luis experiences is so massive that I needed someone with real mileage, someone with the simplicity and humanity of Sergi. He was delicate, generous — with all of us, and especially with the other actors who had never acted before.

Every time we open a newspaper, we’re hit with a blast of collapse — the end of something, of an era, or worse. Are we ready? I hope this film speaks to that twilight feeling many of us share. But let’s not forget — there’s light in it too. The world is going to force us to look inward, just like it does to the character in this film. And that’s an important movement — a gesture we hope to share through Sirât: a light that emerges from the darkness.

I wanted to make a film that had the best of genre and popular cinema — the magic of adventure — without losing the sensory richness of the image. A film that could be a spectacle, and at the same time, an experience that would shake you, then stroke you or scrape at something inside. Curiously, it’s my most open film — and also my most radical. I believe finding that balance is incredibly difficult. The film gradually dematerializes as it moves forward.

Cinematic images usually burn with fire, and when we see them on a screen, they can pierce us like lightning. But sound — sound is born inside the spectator. It’s made of particles already in the body, molecules that respond to the vibration of music and come alive. Working with David Letellier (Kangding Ray) has been a high point in my artistic journey. I’ve never before had the chance to express myself musically with such precision. I wanted to chart a journey — from raw, ferocious, mental techno to the most distilled, transcendent ambient. To reach the point where sound disintegrates. Where narrative and melody dissolve into texture. Where the grain of 16mm film vibrates in sync with the grain and distortion of the music. We wanted the sonic materiality of the image to take center stage — to reach a point where we could see music and hear images. We ended up creating a soundscape symbiotic with the locations — where the desert, its spectral presence, and the music itself become landscapes of consciousness.

I’ve never felt better accompanied. I’ve worked once again with my usual team — Santiago Fillol on the script, Mauro Herce as DoP, Xavi Font and 4a4 in production... But this time I also had the backing of El Deseo, the care of the Almodóvar family, and Oriol Maymó. And for the first time, a Spanish broadcaster — Movistar Plus+ — has truly supported one of my films. From the beginning, they understood what I was trying to do. They’ve been exquisite travel companions.

— Oliver Laxe