Oliver Laxe
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“This Rupture of Utopian Horizons”: Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe on Aro berria
Aro berria, the first feature from Spanish Basque filmmaker Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe, is focused on the revolutionary potential of two spaces: a factory floor and a tent. In the former space, Gorostidi restages the working-class unrest of the late 1970s during Spain’s transition to democracy, opening the film with workers in a San Sebastian water meter plant forming a human snake, their comrades silently putting their tools down and joining in a collective mass. When the more radical workers—many of them young people—fail to sway the plant towards continued action, a number of them leave San Sebastian for the Arco […]
by Alex Lei on Apr 22, 2026 -
The Music Guides the Way: Oliver Laxe and Gaspar Noé Discuss “Sirāt”
When Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt premiered at Cannes this year, it caught both those familiar with his work as well as new viewers off guard; that the film takes an unexpected turn in its second half is only part of its disorienting effect. Where his first three, score-free features defaulted to the quiet and contemplative, Sirāt is nearly an action movie and accordingly nerve-wracking, increasingly suspenseful and—thanks in large part to Kangding Ray’s excellent electronic score—sometimes so deafeningly loud that it’s been known to literally make projection booths shake. With a larger budget and longer schedule than Laxe has had before, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 22, 2025 -
Existential Rave: Kangding Ray on Scoring “Sirāt”
Few recent films have offered such an overwhelmingly immersive audiovisual experience as Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt. It’s no coincidence that the first shots of the film show tough-looking tech guys assembling an intimidatingly huge sound system on a remote and desolate location, as music is a major driving force behind this cinematic trip. The fourth film by the French-Spanish director (Mimosas, Fire Will Come) begins at a psychedelic rave before embarking on a treacherous journey into the Moroccan desert. The highly unusual score is not only notable for its rough-sounding tribal techno, which will surely deliver a massive stress test to […]
by Hugo Emmerzael on Oct 16, 2025 -
Cannes 2025: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning; Eddington; Sirât
Eight years after Cannes dipped its toes into VR waters with their presentation of Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s ultra-haptic empathy machine Carne y Arena (2017), the festival’s general delegate Thierry Frémaux continues to promote cinema’s expanding XR toolbox. In addition to bringing back the festival’s Immersive Competition for a second year—from what I saw of the press tour held a few hours before the Opening Ceremony, it would be difficult to justify a third—Frémaux also, per an interview with Screen International, trained this year’s festival staff using an AI version of his own voice when he couldn’t be present to address them […]
by Blake Williams on May 18, 2025 -
“The Hardest Path is Always the Best Path”: Oliver Laxe on Fire Will Come
Oliver Laxe’s first two films, You All Are Captains (2010) and Mimosas (2016), take place in his adopted home of Morocco. In this year’s Fire Will Come, however, the writer-director returns to his childhood stomping grounds—not Paris, where he was born and raised, but the mountainous enclaves of rural Galicia, an autonomous region in the northwest corner of Spain. Born to Galician parents, Laxe spent formative summer retreats visiting relatives among the natural splendour of the Serra dos Ancares, parts of which overlap with the religious pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago. Drawing from childhood memories, Laxe exalts the […]
by Beatrice Loayza on Oct 28, 2020 -
NYFF 2019: Vitalina Varela, Fire Will Come
Vitalina Varela is a luxuriantly claustrophobic staging of a story Pedro Costa’s title subject, playing herself, first orally recounted in 2014’s Horse Money. The world Costa constructs around her is, initially, an endless night—daylight is, at best, the barest suggestive sliver peeking in from outside. As the narrative unfolds, more sunlight penetrates interiors, but a full radiant glare seems, at best, a hypothetical perk for people with more money, and in the very final-stretch shots in exterior day, colors have been graded down enough where the effect isn’t overwhelming but mutedly in keeping. There isn’t a pixel Costa hasn’t accounted for in his […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 1, 2019 -
Cannes 2019 Dispatch 5: Fire Will Come, Tommaso
We all know that Cannes appraises itself as the supreme purveyor of a given year’s most handsome industrially-produced arthouse motion pictures (that is, those that happen to have completed their post-production by late April of said year) — a launchpad for quote-unquote major achievements by the world’s most recognizable and uncompromising narrative filmmakers. Its unwillingness to accommodate the more outre or difficult projects from directors who fit that description hasn’t been too contentious thanks, mostly, to the Directors’ Fortnight’s relatively eclectic and much less constricted programming philosophy—carried over from one artistic director to the next for more than half a […]
by Blake Williams on May 24, 2019 -
Dispatches from Cannes 2016 and Olhar de Cinema
Cannes 2016 By Blake Williams Sometime around the fourth week of April — after word got out that Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux had rejected Bertrand Bonello’s highly anticipated new film, Nocturama, in which a gang of young radicals plant bombs all over Paris (a film that was definitely finished and was definitely submitted to and seen by the selection committee); after various news outlets began circulating footage of the Cannes municipal police force’s elaborate terror drills at the Palais des Festivals, with faux wounded tourists writhing in agony on the pavement, simulated car bombs, coordinated police raids and all; […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 25, 2016 -
“It’s Good For You To Experience Disasters”: Oliver Laxe on His Forthcoming Feature Las Mimosas
Currently in post-production, Oliver Laxe’s second feature, Las Mimosas, is an ambitious follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut feature, You All Are Captains. Shot in Morocco, where the French-born Spaniard has lived for the best part of a decade, the film has been four years in the making. Produced by Zeitun Films and co-financed by Rouge International (France) and LaProd (Morocco), Laxe’s sophomore feature also received support from several funding schemes at film festivals, including Torino FilmLab and CPH:Forum. With Zeitun Films aiming to unveil the film at another major festival in 2016 (Captains debuted at Cannes in 2010), footage […]
by Michael Pattison on Oct 12, 2015 -
NYFF Critics’ Notebook: The Sky Trembles and The Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers
The Sky Trembles and The Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers (you can memorize the title after reciting it enough times — don’t fret) opens with a small fleet of ’80s Mercedes-Benz coupes, trailed by dune buggies, speeding across a desert. A chase scene entered in media res? The armed-escort arrival of dubious capitalists on the trail of some as-yet-underexploited resource? (Is there any more potent symbol of ostensibly removed colonialism’s lingering presence than the unkillable, diesel-fueled Mercedes that still stalk the globe?) As the sun sets and the caravan moves closer, the camera inches from a far-off, locked-down wide lens perspective to closer […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 2, 2015
