Q&A WITH OLIVER LAXE

Q. Sirāt translates to “the path” and this notion is embedded into the film, with its emphasis on the winding roads and treacherous terrain its characters must face. Was it the Moroccan landscape that inspired the film’s story?

A. I decided on the title one month before the film premiered at Cannes. Sirāt is the way I see life and the way I see death as a way to dialogue with life in a stronger way.

I lived in Morocco for 12 years. I became an adult there in terms of my values and spirituality. It’s a wounded landscape. You feel that you are nothing. That you are a zero. Through anguish, I felt serenity. That’s what Sirāt is about: that through anguish we will hopefully feel less anguish to live.

I hope that the spectator will feel a kind of rebirth. Sirāt is about feeling your own death. We have to die before we die.

Q. Your practice is informed by your faith and you’ve said you wanted this film to connect with young people, who are increasingly faithless. How do you reconcile this discrepancy?

A. At some point, my practice says to me, “I have to do what I think is correct and not think about the consequences.” I obviously know that we are in a time of disenchantment and cynicism. It makes it difficult for people to talk about faith and be optimistic. But I remain optimistic. I still think that human beings are expressing themselves in really beautiful and heroic ways, and that’s because of how hard these times are.

I think that life will push us to the edge and ask us: “What does it mean to be a human being?” And in the end, I think we will be more human. The decadence that we are living through will make us more human.

The people in Sirāt are in communion — they have the same wounds, the same scars. As a filmmaker, I know what the metabolism of a human being is. I know their sensitivity, their intellectual center, their emotional center, their spirit.

Filmmakers have to be like doctors. We know what is good and what is not good for our patients. We know that it’s good for your health if we mix Vitamin A with Zinc and Iron. Sirāt shows us that people are thirsting for transcendence, even if they are not cinephiles. For example, in France, in three weeks, we’ve reached half a million spectators. It’s huge!

I was totally lost in a spiritual sense when I was around 18 or 19 years old. Art, and in particular cinema, helped me discover I had a soul inside myself. Twenty years ago, I started reading Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time and watching his films. This helped me imagine what my soul was. It helped me understand what feeling meant. I realized he was my lineage, my family.

Now, I’m obviously not Tarkovsky, I’m not Bresson, I’m not Dreyer, I’m not Ozu — I’m not these filmmakers. But my intentions are the same: to serve.

I want to stimulate young people who do not have references. I want to shape them and touch them inside. I want to plant a seed inside them, in the way filmmakers previouisly did for me. But, I don’t know if young people are going to the temple of cinema all that much, or if they are going to rave? Hopefully they do both.

Q. As Sirāt evolves, it becomes clear that the world outside of its focus has fallen into shambles. There’s already an ambient sense that the world is falling apart in the real world. Was this something you were responding to with this film?

A. As one character in the film says, “It’s been the end of the world for quite some time.” We are waiting for a new world. We are in a moment of change, from one era to another. We just have to wait. My characters wait. They wait for this world to annihilate itself.

Q. What is the last film you saw and loved?

A. At Cannes, I saw a masterpiece called I Only Rest in the Storm by Pedro Pinho. Beautiful, deep, subtle, intelligent, delicate. Masterpiece.

Q. If you could shoot anywhere in the world, where would you go?

A. Right now I feel really attracted by the Amazons. I’m attracted to the jungle and the plants. They’re calling me.

Q. What have you been listening to lately?

A. I bought a CD from a German musician from the ‘90s called Pole. It’s a blue album. I like it. I used to listen to it when I was a youngster.

Q. What is one way in which you’d like to see the film industry change?

A. I would like the industry to invest more money into education. Even from a pragmatic, business point-of-view, you have to create customers and you can’t lose them. So I think it’d be healthy for the industry to invest in education.

I also think that cinema has to re-spiritualize itself. I know it’s absurd and a contradiction, but I would like an industry and filmmakers that embrace shadows more in films. I think that we’re in a moment when our films have too much rhetoric. We want to say too many things and we don’t say anything. We don’t evoke anything.

People don’t feel things. I’d like it if society became more esoteric, and had a more esoteric education. The only issue we have in society is our inability to look inside.

Q. What image would you like to end this interview with?

A. I like the moment the bells sound in Andrei Rublev. There’s this kid who says he does not know how to work the bells and starts crying when he finally gets them to make sound.

Andrei, who had been in a vow of silence for years, says to the child: “You will make bells. I will paint cathedrals.” The child screams and says, “My dad did not give me the secret for building bells.” And Andrei Rublev says, “You will make bells, I will paint cathedrals.” He’s giving himself over to his intuition. Art and life is about this: to surrender, to jump into the abyss. I like this film, it’s probably my favorite one.