'Sirat' or suppurating the wound
Sirado It is a dramatic epiphany from 2025 co-written and directed by the Galician Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982), which will represent Spain at the 2026 Oscars. It is a film starring Sergi López and Bruno Núñez that, as a plot, exposes the search for a missing daughter in the deserts of southern Morocco by a father and his brother. The film premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival 2025, where won the Jury Prize (ex aequo with the German Sound of falling). Beyond being a film, it is the proposal of a journey that zigzags through personal and collective crises, through the precipices of the loss of values in today's society and that makes you enter, whether you want to or not, into the wound of life or, what would be the same: makes you jump into the abyss of fragility.
A Sirado, Laxe intertwines, with the accompaniment of a demonized culture like that of the radish, music and image in an experience that transcends the mere presence of sound to become an authentic neurotic element of the film. From the writing process, the director worked on the soundtrack with the French musician David Letellier (known as Kangding Ray) so that the electronic textures were not a simple background, but a narrative element that guided the transformation of the characters and the viewer himself, with a powerful, repetitive and hypnotic sound, as is usual in the radishes, which provide us with spaces of disinhibition.
In accordance with Nietzsche, who said that he would not believe in a God who does not dance, the film opens with the frenetic energy of a radish nocturnal, where the blessed Techno summons an immediate physicality: the body vibrates, the image pulses, the viewer feels before thinking, or rather, cannot think because they only feel. There is no time to think, only to lose oneself completely in the void. In this opening scene, in which the amplifiers are another character because they are the primordial source of sound, the camera glides between bodies sweaty from hours of debauchery, worn out by colliding with the insurmountable walls of the system, oblivious of everything and everyone, while the rays of the sun or the moon (in this one internal to the desert air; the deep and piercing sound) not only reinforce the image, but generate a collective transit that introduces the central theme of the film: the search for meaning through physical experience, through individual, personal exposure, of the inner being that ends up being another cog in the collective, through the experience that leads to an intimate and lacerated exteriority of the birth, links it ditch tabula which represents the desert.
As the journey progresses between the dunes and the rocky areas of the desert, the recitative of the Quran that appears like a mirage discovered by one of the protagonists proposes a turning point, an invitation to silence, although it later returns to that initial dust that dematerializes in the atmosphere. at dawn along an empty road while only an electronic hum can be heard that is confused with the murmur of the wind. At that moment, music ceases to be a festive event and becomes an inner search, a heartbeat that accompanies the emotional drift of the protagonist in his search for his daughter. The arid landscape, the prolonged silences and the incidence of light turn each shot into a sensorial experience that balances the excessive sound of the beginning with an almost mystical contemplation, where those who accompany the main character are like a kind of fallen angels that represent the pirate, the gypsy, the punk, the freak, the hippie...and that by denying rationality they give themselves over only to feeling.
This sonorous and magnetic evolution engages directly with the lack of values and tensions in contemporary society, and proposes a solidarity that is born between the protagonists as if the petals of a rose were gradually shedding. Laxe sets his story in a de-spiritualized Europe, dominated by ego and noise, and proposes music, collective dance and contact with nature as avenues to a new way of living within the open wound, which is not found in the enlightened heritage of our society, but in physical experience and personal crisis. radish In the desert, it appears as a space of community and resistance to individualism, a territory where bodies merge into a common energy that challenges hierarchies and norms. The emptiness and harshness of the horizon function perfectly as a metaphor for a present in which the lack of direction and the uncertainty of the future force us to confront the present of pain (of the loss of loved ones) and to search for meaning beyond the naive certainties of today's society.
In this fusion of electronics and landscape, of technology and nature, Sirado It embodies many contradictions of our time. We live surrounded by stimuli and promises of progress, yet we still need silence, ritual, and connection with one another, even if it means the wounds festering. Music and image embody an initiatory journey that becomes a ritual inviting us to leave behind contradictions, failures, and the simulation of life, to rediscover vulnerability and accept the destiny that each of us chooses or is assigned to us, no matter how difficult it may be. Sirado, Laxe transforms cinema into a sensorial, physical experience, but one that is not lacking in ethics and that questions the spectator who finds himself in a world saturated with artificiality, with a great Dionysian party with some Apollonian pill, that of a radish in the desert which is nothing more than a bridge connecting hell with paradise.
