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Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind the year’s most talked-about movies, continues with Sirāt, Neon’s drama by writer-director Oliver Laxe. The acclaimed film had its world premiere in the main competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, where it won the prestigious Jury Prize. It has also been selected as the Spanish submission for this year’s Best International Feature Film Oscar race.
Neon released Sirāt in mid-November in U.S. theaters after strong runs in its native Spain and France. It has since scored best foreign film nominations from the Gothams, Critics Choice, Indie Spirits and the Golden Globes, as well scooping nine European Film Awards nominations.
The narrative of Sirāt opens with an illegal EDM rave within the Moroccan desert. Driven by paternal desperation, the film introduces Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged father, accompanied by his young son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona). Both are on a mission, handing out flyers for Luis’ missing daughter, Mar, swallowed by the seemingly endless nomadic rave culture. The initial, clear-cut search for a lost child is disrupted when local police forces descend upon and dismantle the party, amplified by unsettling radio chatter concerning an escalating global conflict.
Undeterred by the chaos and convinced his daughter is potentially at another rave near the Mauritanian frontier, Luis makes a pivotal, reckless decision. He attaches himself and Esteban to a small, motley group of ravers, following their caravan across the brutal terrain of the Saghro desert. This ensuing odyssey rapidly evolves from a mere tracking expedition into a brutal test of endurance and a profound, sensory initiation. As the characters’ physical and emotional reserves are depleted, the quest for Mar reaches a terrifying climax: It is at the film’s arc, when Luis is already at his breaking point, that an unexpected and shocking scene occurs, changing gears and forever fracturing his understanding of the world and his own desperate actions.
The film’s core focus is on the emotional and physical transformation of the protagonist. Luis is introduced as a desperate, burdened father attempting to re-establish a connection with his absent daughter and grappling with his failure to protect her. He represents the tether to the conventional world, contrasting sharply with the ravers who embody a radical coherence and an alternative lifestyle. This cabal of free spirits, often exhibiting a sinewy appearance and physical “scars” (including missing limbs), lives a life detached from societal conventions, seeking transcendence through music and collective ecstasy. Luis, along with Esteban, is gradually welcomed into their found family. Over the course of the journey, this interaction forces a shift in Luis: he begins to let go of his worldly desperation, moving away from his initial obsession and toward a kind of fatalistic detachment, mirroring the ravers’ embrace of their disconnection from a seemingly collapsing world.
Sirāt‘s central themes are deeply rooted in both metaphysical allegory and contemporary societal critique. The title itself is a key thematic element, referring to the Sirāt, the razor-thin bridge in Islamic eschatology that spans the chasm between paradise and hell. This concept is brought to life by the characters’ perilous physical and psychological journey, constantly suspended between destruction and renewal, reality and metaphor.
The film is an existential quest that explores how humans seek meaning and self-connection on the fringes of civilization. The rave culture is framed as a modern form of spiritual pilgrimage, a pursuit of epiphany, religious ecstasy, and the loss of self in dance. The vast, indifferent Moroccan desert acts as a major character, stripping the human characters bare and forcing a primal confrontation with mortality, loss, and the unconstrained forces of nature. The narrative contrasts Luis’s desire to restore his family unit with the ravers’ desire for radical personal freedom and escape. The background hum of an escalating global conflict suggests that the characters’ decision to venture deeper into the wilderness is a form of apocalyptic escapism, a choice to find a different kind of meaning at the “end of the world.”
Read the screenplay below.
English (US) ·