Sirât

Synopsis

After a young woman goes missing at a rave deep in the mountains of southern Morocco, her father and brother traverse the forbidden desert landscape searching for her. Their journey takes them from one dance party to another, but none of the itinerant revelers can point to her whereabouts. Hearing rumors of an event near the border of Mauritania, the pair take up with a band of outsiders, together embarking on one last dangerous journey beneath the scorching sun.

The pounding pulse of electronica provides the soundtrack to a gripping existential journey to ends of the earth—the film’s title refers to the bridge separating Heaven and Hell in Islamic tradition. Unfolding amid an apocalyptic landscape in which reports of conflict and other crises issue from the radio, director Oliver Laxe’s metaphysical road movie, produced by Spanish cinema icon Pedro Almodóvar, is simultaneously meditative and harrowing in its potent exploration of loss, grief, and violence.