The Burning Visions of Oliver Laxe

Oliver Laxe has been admired by filmgoers with an interest in the mystical side of cinema and the curious compounds created through the intermixing of documentary and fiction since the appearance of his 2010 feature debut You Are All Captains, made in collaboration with students at a filmmaking workshop for impoverished youths in Tangier. Now, the Franco-Galician director stands on the brink of a wider breakthrough. His latest film, Sirāt, which won the Jury Prize at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, is a hallucinatory odyssey across the wilds of southern Morocco—its lunar landscapes among many astonishing vistas explored in Laxe’s cinema—draws new acolytes to this sensorially overwhelming, visually arresting brand of filmmaking. Metrograph revisits his body of work to date, with Laxe himself stopping by to present a special screening of Sirāt.