In the cinema of Oliver Laxe there is a spirituality, a ritual, as if the director wanted to reconcile those who look with the screen, the viewer with the images. A reconciliation that passes through a rite, in which the images themselves seem to return energy. This is what happens in Sirāt, his last film, where the movement of the bodies imposed by the beats becomes a kinetic movement. As Laxe himself says in an interview: “For me it is powerful to be on the track at a rave, surrounded by people who do the same thing. Cinema is the same. At the cinema we are sitting in the dark and there is no family relationship with the people we are sitting with. But there is a subtle and energetic relationship with people while watching the film.”.
Laxe was born in 1982 in Paris by parents emigrated Galicia, and at the age of six he returned with his family in Galicia, in the northwest of Spain. After his adolescence in La Coruña he moved to Barcelona, where he graduated in Audiovisual Communication at the Universit Pompeu Fabra and began to devote himself to the cinema, turning the first short films in London before establishing himself for a period in Tangier, Morocco, where he created a cinema workshop in 16 mm with children that gives rise to his first feature film, Todos vós sodes capitáns, winner of the CI Award.
His subsequent films Mimosas and O que arde are also awarded at the French Festival with the Grand Prix at the Semaine de la Critique and in the Un Certain Regard section. Taking up the talk about spirituality and the public, the director during an interview, talking about Mimosas, describes him as “a metaphysical adventure” and continues explaining that “there is also a kind of transcendence that I believe also the public desires. I think there is an experience of mystery, of strangeness. There is a necessity, between something clear and something more mysterious, in this film, and I like it”. The film – defined by Laxe as a religious western – takes the contours of a spiritual and initiatory journey by telling the journey of a caravan that must transport the body of a sheikh across the Atlas mountains to reach Sijilmassa.
After his first two films Laxe feels the need to return to work in his land, in Galicia and in particular in the village where the mother was born, a place that marked his first memories immersed in the mountains and nature. It is a condition, that which binds natural landscapes to the way they are told by the images, which always returns to his cinema.
In particular, the director in an interview describes the landscapes of his O que arde, the film born of this “back home” as “a very important place for me: it is my foundation. My first memory of the Ancares dates back to when I was 4. Like most Spanish immigrants, we returned to Spain every summer.” This relationship with nature is analyzed in the film for contrasts telling of Amador, a former prison pyromaniac who returns to live in the Galician mansion where he grew up.
This is how you get to Sirāt, where the relationship between bodies, nature and spirituality is extremised until you become trial, travel, path, already inscribed in the title. In fact, Sirāt sends, in the Islamic context, to a precise eschatological meaning, that of the subtle bridge as a hair and sharp as a sword stretched over Hell, therefore the ultimate destiny of man. A metaphor that also resounds in the vision of Oliver Laxe, as the director himself explained at FilmStage: “Sirāt and all my films speak of this sovereign submission. This submission to something that’s bigger than you. Sirāt evokes the fact that life does not give you what you are looking for, just like cinema.”.
In the cinema of Oliver Laxe, more than telling stories and answering questions, it is about approaching a physical, spiritual, ethical experience. A cinema that asks the viewer the same availability at the risk of its characters, called to cross hostile spaces, extreme landscapes, areas of moral uncertainty. Film after film, Laxe builds an idea of live cinema in contrast to what he believes, that is, as FilmStage said, “the images are dead. They died because they have too much weight. I’m there to say things, to say too many, to explain excessively something. An image does not have the responsibility to say something; it must evoke something”.
L’articolo Oliver Laxe, moving spirituality proviene da SentieriSelvaggi.
