Marrakech – At the 22nd edition of the Marrakech International Film Festival (FIFM), Olivier Laxe stood on familiar ground.
Laxe is a Spanish filmmaker, screenwriter, and actor born in France, with roots in Galicia. He is widely recognized for works such as You All Are Captains, Mimosas, Fire Will Come, and Sirat. With Sirat, Laxe received the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.
His film “Sirat,” also presented in the 11th Continent category, marks both a professional milestone and a personal homecoming.
“I lived here ten years,” he said, smiling as he spoke of Morocco as a place that continues to anchor his work. Even amid a demanding schedule that includes the British Independent Film Awards happening simultaneously in the UK, Laxe insisted he wanted to be in Marrakech: “I really wanted to present the film in Morocco.”
For Laxe, Morocco is not just a setting. It is a terrain he knows intimately, particularly the southern regions around Ouarzazate, where he spent years observing landscapes that he describes as humbling and nurturing.
The director’s connection to the desert is evident in every frame of Sirat. “The landscape is not just a place,” he explained. “Nature challenges you, it puts you to the test, it speaks. You have to read the signs.”
In his view, the mountains and desert do more than shape the film’s visual identity – they shape the people who stand within them. “They make me feel small, and that’s the real nature of being human,” he said. “It impresses you but gives you serenity.”
A film that walks on the edge
Laxe’s filmmaking is defined by difficulty, by choice. “I look for problems in the shoot,” he admitted with disarming ease. For him, art lives in extremity. “Art, life, spirituality – they’re about going to the limit. That’s where you learn.”
Shooting part of Sirat in the Sahara demanded endurance, but Laxe refused to frame it as hardship. “I don’t understand life without difficulties, nor my job,” he said. “For me, doing my work is going to the limit.”
The director credits his Moroccan team with making those limits bearable. Working with the production company Montfleury, he found what he calls an essential equilibrium on set. “A shoot isn’t only about talent and technical experience. It’s also psychological,” he said.
Long days, emotional intensity, and physical demands require more than skill. They require presence. “Having people next to you who have sbar (patience), hamd (gratefulness), iman (faith) – it helps,” he added. “When there are problems and they say ‘alhamdulillah wa shukurillah’, it helps.”
Spiritual cinema, without explaining everything
Sirat continues Laxe’s exploration of spirituality, not as doctrine, but as lived experience. He cites a hadith that inspires the film’s visual search: “Allah al-jamil wa yuhib al-jamal” (“God is beautiful and loves beauty”).
For him, the world’s contradictions and paradoxes contain their own form of sacred order. “The mystery of the world is in that beauty,” he said.
Yet he resists didacticism. “Today, art, especially in the West, has too much clarity. It becomes too demonstrative,” he said.
He prefers ambiguity, trusting images to operate on a deeper, invisible register. “Images are a tool of esoteric transmission,” he explained. “They penetrate you in another way.”
Many viewers leave Sirat saying they did not fully understand it, and Laxe accepts that without hesitation. “I’m like a doctor. I know my profession. I know how to make images that make people look inside.”
One of the film’s moments he cherishes most involves listening to Surat Maryam. “It penetrates the body and the soul,” he said. “I have no doubt.”
Success, freedom, and the place of fear
Although Laxe speaks with spiritual detachment, he acknowledges ambition. “I have a lot of nafs (pride),” he said with a quiet laugh. “Awards are important. Success is important.” Not for prestige, but for what it unlocks: freedom for future projects.
Still, he sees his cinema as a response to fear, particularly the fear he observes in contemporary society. “Today, people are afraid, so they calculate a lot,” he said. “In my films, they feel a certain freedom. And that freedom comes from my faith. I am not afraid of failure.”
Returning to Morocco to share Sirat brings that freedom full circle. For Laxe, shooting here is never just a logistical choice but a return to a place he describes as “of scandalous beauty,” a place where nature confronts and consoles, a place where cinema becomes an act of listening.
“I think Morocco is showing excellence on many levels as a society,” he reflected. “And it keeps its soul, it keeps its truth.”
