Sirāt and the Desert as a European Fantasy: Landscape, Abstraction, and Political Erasure
This aesthetic operation, highly immersive for viewers, nonetheless contains a political paradox: the more absolute the landscape becomes, the more its historical depth is attenuated. The territory is reduced to an existential metaphor, and this abstraction produces an erasure effect that recalls a visual tradition deeply tied to the colonial gaze.
By Natalia Llorens
In certain contemporary images of the desert, the landscape ceases to be a concrete territory and becomes a total sensory experience. Mineral vastness, the boundless horizon, and physical exposure turn into an atmosphere that envelops both the bodies that traverse it and the gaze that observes them. Within this visual regime, space does not function as a social or historical environment but as an affective surface: a place where emotions seem amplified by geographic scale and where history dissolves. This aesthetic operation, highly immersive for viewers, nonetheless contains a political paradox: the more absolute the landscape becomes, the more its historical depth is attenuated. The territory is reduced to an existential metaphor, and this abstraction produces an erasure effect that recalls a visual tradition deeply tied to the colonial gaze: non-European spaces turned into stages for other people’s crises, rather than places shaped by their own memories, conflicts, and subjects.
This is the framework within which Sirāt is situated. In the film, the desert is not merely a setting; it is the organizing principle of the entire cinematic experience. From the outset, the landscape functions as a surface for emotional projection rather than as a space with political density. Even certain spatial details the narrative drops (trajectories, directions, references to border zones) point to a real geography marked by a very specific and conflict-ridden history. Movements are suggested that only make sense if one assumes as “natural” that Morocco borders Mauritania—something that holds true only if the occupation of Western Sahara is taken as normalized. It is hardly plausible that Oliver Laxe, who has already shot three films in that territory, is unaware of this geopolitical reality. Yet instead of activating that historical background, the film neutralizes it: political coordinates turn into atmosphere, and what might open a critical dimension of space is absorbed by the abstraction of landscape. The territory is recognizable, but its constitutive conflict becomes invisible.
The point is not to demand that fiction deliver a geopolitical treatise, but to analyze its regime of representation. Every image organizes the world, establishes hierarchies of visibility, and determines which dimensions of reality gain prominence and which recede into the background. Here, the balance systematically tilts toward sensory experience and the fragmented interiority of the characters, while space appears as an almost metaphysical nature, an “outside” onto which human drama is projected without anchorage. This gesture has a long history in Western visual culture: non-European spaces filmed as absolute landscapes, available for the transformative experience of the subject who crosses them. Although the film makes no explicit colonial statement, its way of looking produces a recognizable effect: the territory loses its political density and becomes an existential backdrop.
This shift toward sensation is reinforced by undeniable formal virtuosity. Sirāt impresses through its visual and sonic treatment: the scale of the shots, the texture of the wind, the vibration of the music, and the choreography of bodies in motion build a powerful immersive dispositif. Yet this sensory display coexists with a dramaturgy that grows progressively fragile. The film repeatedly resorts to shock moments, many marked by extreme cruelty that erupts without sufficient dramatic preparation. Violence appears abruptly, disproportionately, almost absurdly. The narrative seems to flirt with a logic of shock in which events do not emerge from a narrative process but fall upon the characters like sudden discharges. In this sense, Sirāt can be read as an anti-suspense film. Classical suspense builds anticipation, emotional involvement, and a gradual intensification of danger. Here, by contrast, tension does not accumulate; it simply explodes. Extreme events burst forth as sensory impacts rather than as consequences of a dramatic architecture that binds the viewer to the characters’ fate. After each explosion, the narrative does not pause to inhabit the consequences. Even when cruelty reaches a very high point midway through the film, the emotional and spiritual repercussions are not conveyed with the same intensity as the staging of the event itself. The characters endure losses and horrors without those experiences deeply reorganizing their dramatic presence—something terrible happened… anyway, on to the next shot.
This is where the way the story is told intersects with politics. The same decision to present the place without history also causes pain to lose weight and consequence. The territory appears as a space of pure intensity, as if it were only landscape and emotion, detached from concrete social problems. Violence is shown as a powerful impact for the viewer, but not as something with real causes or effects in people’s lives. Seen this way, a very old way of looking at certain parts of the world is repeated: territories outside Europe appear as extreme settings, where everything is harsher, more physical, and closer to death, yet curiously without politics, without responsible agents, without history. They are presented as grounds for European adventure, not as homes to people with real conflicts. Suffering is depicted as if it were a natural part of the landscape, not the result of human decisions, wars, or injustices. For this reason, the film does not need to say anything overtly colonial to produce a gaze that functions in that way. By presenting the world as a natural tragedy rather than as a history full of conflicts and responsibilities, it ends up reinforcing a way of seeing that erases politics and turns pain into mere scenery.
The narrative drift reinforces this logic. As the film progresses, the story gradually dissolves to make way for collective choreographies, physical displacements, and states of audiovisual trance. The journey does not lead to a profound reconfiguration of the characters, but to an accumulation of extreme experiences that do not sediment. The desert ultimately functions as a force that absorbs everything: history, memory, bonds, consequences. Not only is the political density of the territory erased; the history of the film itself is progressively erased as well. This narrative dissolution accompanies the historical one: the landscape as absolute metaphor ends up devouring both geopolitics and drama.
Recognizing this dimension does not mean denying the film’s formal achievements or its sensory power. It means situating them within an economy of images in which visual beauty and sonic intensity can coexist with a hollowing out of historical depth. Sirāt turns territory into an extreme aesthetic experience and pain into a variation of intensity, but in doing so it risks reproducing an old colonial fantasy in contemporary form: that of an other, absolute space where anything can happen because nothing needs to be explained. The desert thus appears as the perfect alibi—a place that absorbs history, neutralizes politics, and transforms cruelty into sensory spectacle.
