Oliver Laxe

Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) is one of the most internationally recognised of contemporary filmmakers. His cinematographic practice addresses social issues through familiar contexts and site-specific research. By interweaving fiction and reality, he employs a highly personal form of experimental poetics in which different genres and cinematographic languages coexist.

His early works were made in film format—S-8mm and 16mm—as part of the experimental film platform no.w.here in London, the city where he finished his film studies. He moved to Tangier, Morocco, in 2007, where he set up the Dao Byed project, a film workshop for underprivileged children in the Maghreb. Collaborative and community-based experience would henceforth be a constant in Laxe's filmmaking and inspired his first feature, Todos vosotros sois capitanes (You're all captains, 2009), winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the Cannes International Film Festival. This was followed by Mimosas (2016) and O que arde (What burns, 2019), both of them critically acclaimed and recipients of prestigious awards.

The Museo Reina Sofía showcases a new piece by Laxe in Space 1, based around his latest film, Sirat (Cannes Jury Prize 2025). Sirat takes place at a rave, affording Laxe a new cinematographic opportunity to reflect on the practice of collaboration as well as to delve deeper into the microethnography of raving, as McKenzie Wark described it. Filmed on location in Morocco and Aragon, Spain, the film becomes Laxe's latest personal essay, one in which mysticism, a search for the self, learning about other non-rationalist cultures, and the hybridisation of genres all intertwine. Screening the film in the context of the Museo Reina Sofía is, furthermore, presented as an installation and a challenge to the inherent limitations of the cinema screen.

The presentation of this new work by Oliver Laxe also serves as a pretext to show a selection of other films by the director (feature films and experimental short films) that together reveal the complexity and richness of his cinematographic practice. His is a filmmaking in which the director often also acts and generally displays a degree of personal involvement that becomes inseparable from the work itself.

This installation launches a new series showcasing films that link “exposition cinema” —screened in Space 1— to traditional cinema — screened in the museum's refurbished cinema—, while at the same time challenging the very distinction.