Sergi López's pirate film that shocked the Cannes Film Festival

Special Envoy to CannesWhen the Cannes Film Festival is over and the accredited journalists make a mental list of the scenes we saw, the ones we won't be able to get out of our heads, surely the one that breaks in half won't be missing from any list. Sirât, the film by the Galician filmmaker Oliver Laxe –produced by a large part of the Catalan team and produced by Pedro Almodóvar's production company, El Deseo– was presented this Thursday in the official competition and will therefore compete for the Palme d'Or. Sirât It is the story of a father (Sergi López) who, along with his young son, searches for the trail of his eldest daughter, who has been missing for months. The trail they follow leads them to a radish which is held in the Moroccan desert and, with a handful of regular participants of these illegal parties, they embark on a new journey in search of another radish where, perhaps, who knows, they might find the girl. It's the small hope that drives them to cross a desert filled with uncertainty and danger.

Recovering the adventurous tone of his second film, Mimosas, Laxe grafts this family crusade into the world of electronic music and vital nomadism of the ravers, almost a pirate crew –and family chosen from the margins of society– played by inexperienced actors, regulars in the radishes"We wanted to privilege the truth," explains the director, who toured several radishes to conduct the casting. "What I like is that they're people who expose their wounds and weaknesses. They reach a limit, surrender, and accept themselves, and that moves me."

The idea of surrender takes hold when the film reaches the scene where he breaks down, when tragedy takes center stage and overwhelms all other considerations. It is also the moment that reveals his nature as an inner journey that leads from the deepest pain to spiritual enlightenment, and from trauma to revelation. "For me, faith is the human capacity to accept, in all the tragedies and obstacles that life throws at us, a mercy, and even a gift, an opportunity to grow," Laxe asserts. "And at the end of the film, we understand that life is like that, full of twists and turns, blessed be they."

Neither Haneke nor Von Trier

The dramatic explosions of Sirât could bring it closer to the territory of cinema that uses horror and cruelty to impact the viewer, but Laxe distances herself by claiming her "modesty" when it comes to filming pain: "I have a vocation for service, to invite the viewer to a kind of rite of passage in this thanatophobic society that is always sadistic, I am not Michael Haneke or Lars von Trier. I love the people I film, and I think it shows.

In the spiritual journey of Sirât the earthly presence of plays a key role Sergi López, a man facing extreme circumstances. "He's a conventional, ordinary man, like me, who finds himself in an alien world of Martians who look at him as if he were the Martian," says López, a "normal man" who, Sirât has already accumulated nine participations in films in the Cannes competition, ten if we add The man who killed Don Quixote, the closing ceremony of 2017. "It's mind-blowing, I don't understand it," says the actor. "I prefer to downplay it, because in reality, Cannes doesn't select films based on the actor." To put this milestone into perspective, Juliette Binoche, the jury president, has only appeared in the competition eight times. "I don't want to be a jury president, okay?" López assures. "Thierry [Fremaux, festival director] already proposed it to me, and I said no. He was completely indifferent, and I think he's thought I'm an idiot ever since, but that's not my goal."