Trance Landscapes. The Films of Oliver Laxe

Spain and France, 2025, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Spanish, 115’ 

As a father (Sergi López) and son (Bruno Núñez Arjona) search for Mar, their daughter and sister who has disappeared at a rave, they also imbibe a nomadic and alternative way of life which stems from partying and electronic music culture. A life devoid of material trappings and bourgeois codes, yet full and affective, enlivened by the community of ravers — non-actors playing themselves. In Arabic Sirāt means a bridge, the transit towards another state in which pain is part of the catharsis. Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes and nominated for the Best International Feature Film and Best Sound Awards at the 2026 Oscars, the film draws as much from 1960s counterculture (Zabriskie Point) as genre film-making (Mad Max) to construct an essay on contemporary unease. The sublime and ominous desert photography of Mauro Herce and the techno soundtrack of Kanding Ray point to the construction of a mood state that transcends towards the physical and the sensorial.      

Kazakhstan and France, 1999, DCP, colour, sound, restored release version, in Kazakh with Spanish subtitles, 53’  

The first film in Oliver Laxe’s carte blanche sessions and one of the major thematic and iconic influences on Sirāt. Trance en el desierto, Highway throws into relief the life of a travelling-circus family across the Russian steppe. Eccentric lives are taken to extremes on a majestic plain split by a highway to nowhere and with a truck as a dwelling. A winner in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes with Tulpan (2008), Sergei Dvortsevoy (Kazakhstan, 1962) is a key figure in the contemporary observational documentary, making the camera in his film-making an invisible element that allows the viewer to witness subjects and events of immense beauty, and an honesty that meets their gaze for the first time.  
Acknowledgements: L'Alternativa, Festival de Cinema Independent de Barcelona. 

Spain and France, 2025, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Spanish, 115’ 

Oliver Laxe. Suena la trompeta, ahora veo otra cara (As the Trumpet Sounds I See Another Face) 
Spain and Morocco, 2007, digital archive, colour, no sound, without dialogue, 8’ 

Oliver Laxe. Mimosas 
Spain and Morocco, 2016, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Arabic with Spanish subtitles, 98’ 

Oliver Laxe’s second feature-length film and winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes Critics’ Week. With a screenplay by Santiago Fillol, one of the film-maker’s regular collaborators, and shot entirely in Arabic in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, Mimosas follows the journey of a caravan in realising the wish of its leader, an elderly sheikh, of arriving at the medieval city of Sijilmasa, the place he longs to reach to die and be buried there. In the middle of a fraught expedition, the leader dies and a young man with messianic and rash qualities takes on the mantle of transporting the body of the dead man. Mimosas is informed by the western genre, with a caravan’s final mission in the harshness of nature, and Sufi mysticism, with the search for transcendence as an objective, in a mysterious fable of duty and ethics. The session is opened by Laxe’s short film Suena la trompeta, ahora veo otra cara (As the Trumpet Sounds I See Another Face), a lyrical portrait, in 16mm, of male faces, some of which appear in Mimosas, presaging the fusion of landscape and subject from this film and tracing Laxe’s origins in the grammar of experimental film.      

Armenia, 1975, DCP, black and white, sound, original version in Armenian with Spanish subtitles, 30’  

Oliver Laxe’s second carte blanche session. The Seasons is an elegy to the passage of time and to the adaptation of the most elementary human activities — livestock farming, agriculture, cookery — that is, to the changes and challenges that shape nature. With Vivaldi’s Four Seasons fusing with the ancestral sounds of these actions, Peleshian creates a lyrical fresco on the harmonious yet toiling existence of humans in the natural world. Shot in Armenia, The Seasons is also the film-maker’s ode to his countrymen, the Armenian people, in their effort to cling to life. Regarded as one of the most original figures in Soviet and world cinema, Artavazd Peleshian (1938–2023) was a film-maker known for his theories of montage and long-form poetic work.

Morocco and the UK, 2015, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Arabic, Berber, French and Spanish with Spanish subtitles  

A film in two parts. The first is an exercise of cannibal film in which Ben Rivers makes a new film based on Mimosas and from the different beautiful and extreme situations entailed in shooting the film deep in the Atlas Mountains. The second is a fable on racial mixing and cultural colonisation, inspired by Paul Bowles’ A Distant Episode (1947), the source of this film’s title. In Bowles’ short story, a self-important European linguist travels to North Africa to study the local dialect and is captured by a Berber tribe and stripped of his identity, culminating in him losing his speech. In Rivers’ version it is Laxe who is trapped as the Western film-maker and altered in a dancing, paradoxical figure, with Rivers showing us Laxe’s interpretive qualities while speaking of the director’s living process to divest himself of Western rationalism. 

Oliver Laxe. Suena la trompeta, ahora veo otra cara (As the Trumpet Sounds I See Another Face) 
Spain and Morocco, 2007, digital archive, colour, no sound, without dialogue, 8’

Oliver Laxe. Mimosas 
Spain and Morocco, 2016, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Arabic with Spanish subtitles, 98’ 

Oliver Laxe. París #1 
Spain, 2007, DCP, black and white, sound, original version in Spanish and Galician with Spanish subtitles, 35’ 

Oliver Laxe. O que arde (Fire Will Come) 
Spain, France and Luxemburg, 2019, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Galician and Spanish with Spanish subtitles, 85’ 

Oliver Laxe exists in a contradictory space: on one side, an international film-maker; on the other, with a body of work that is inseparable from local discourse. This session explores the idea of the genius loci, understood in the sense of belonging and protecting a home. Born in Paris to Galician migrants, Laxe returns with his family to their place of origin, the Valle de los Ancares, a mountainous area shared between the Galicia, León and Asturias regions and the place the film-maker considers home. París #1, named as such because the French capital was the migratory destination of the locals, is a travel journal around the Ancares mountains that forms an impressionistic manifestation of O que arde (Fire Will Come). Winner of the Jury Prize within the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and honoured with two Goya Awards in 2020 — Best Photography, for the work of Mauro Herce, and Best New Actress, for Benedicta Sánchez — O que arde is a rural drama on a convicted pyromaniac’s return to his village. Laxe grabs our attention here with how he incorporates the nature of the Ancares mountains, the peerless use of non-actors — such as Benedicta Sánchez — and the masterly use of psychology on the viewer.  

Portugal, 1976, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Portuguese with Spanish subtitles, 111’ 
Digitization by Cinemateca Portuguesa - Museu do Cinema

Oliver Laxe’s third carte blanche session. Trás-os-Montes is a unique poetic film that explores the Trás-os-Montes region in north-east Portugal with a gaze situated between ethnography, fiction and myth. Shot from September to October 1974 and edited for almost a year, this feature film travels, with a contemplative camera, through the towns, landscapes and inhabitants of the region, an impoverished and remote land sculpted by emigration and rural depopulation. By way of the daily gestures of the elderly, women, children and shepherds, and legends, rituals and fragments of ancestral voices, the film composes a poem of the land, where past and present merge and geography becomes the bearer of memory and myth. Trás-os-Montes is a crowning work in world cinema, prompting a sensorial and reflective experience on the cycle of life and the passage of time.  

Oliver Laxe. París #1 
Spain, 2007, DCP, black and white, sound, original version in Spanish and Galician with Spanish subtitles, 35’ 

Oliver Laxe. O que arde (Fire Will Come) 
Spain, France and Luxemburg, 2019, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Galician and Spanish with Spanish subtitles, 85’ 

Oliver Laxe and Enrique Aguilar. Y las chimeneas decidieron escapar (And the Chimneys Decided to Escape) 
Spain, 2006, DCP, black and white, sound, without dialogue, 12’  

Oliver Laxe. Todos vós sodes capitáns (You All Are Captains) 
Spain, 2010, DCP, black and white, sound, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, 85’ 

This session presents the beginnings of the film-maker via one of his early short films and his first feature-length film, two pieces that work as sides of the same coin. Both show a desire to explore realities that differ from the lay and functional dogma of modernity. Y las chimeneas decidieron escapar (And the Chimneys Decided to Escape) is a short film on the machinic, dehumanising violence of the metropolis, made up of fragmented images, noise, vibrations and out-of-focus shots. On the flipside, Todos vós sodes capitáns (You All Are Captains) is film-making as a game of rebellion and learning through a film workshop in Tangiers with a group of Moroccan children. Through this fun experiment, the children learn to invent other forms of representation, mobilise narratives of emancipation and break down north-south barriers that establish who, what and how is represented; an exercise with shades of Jean Vigo in Zero for Conduct, whereby a young Laxe is also part of the learning. The film received the Critics’ Prize within the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.

Japan, 1960, DCP, black and white, sound, without dialogue, with Spanish subtitles, 98’ 

Oliver Laxe’s fourth and final carte blanche session. On this occasion he selects one of the salient films from Japanese post-war realism, The Naked Island, a reflection on work, the passing of time and human resilience. The film is shaped by a poetic naturalism focused on its fundamentals. With no dialogue and a film score by composer Hikaru Hayashi, it depicts the life of a farming family of four in their efforts to inhabit a deserted island on the Seto Inland Sea in Japan. With its pure black and white and monumental landscape photography recalling Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema, The Naked Island sees Kaneto Shindô’s camera turn this daily toil into an arresting visual ritual: long journeys, repeated gestures and a constant struggle against the environment make the viewer feel the physical and symbolic weight of survival in the middle of paradise. However, a family tragedy breaks this routine, leading to a profound exploration of the fragile nature of existence.      

Oliver Laxe and Enrique Aguilar. Y las chimeneas decidieron escapar (And the Chimneys Decided to Escape) 
Spain, 2006, DCP, black and white, sound, without dialogue, 12’  

Oliver Laxe. Todos vós sodes capitáns (You All Are Captains) 
Spain, 2010, DCP, black and white, sound, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, 85’