At raves, the dance floor is present. You go to a usual Lagos party, and there is no dance floor. We barely have spaces to just dance, spaces you can just go to literally have a nice time. Most places you have to make a reservation, or book a table, it is a lot more complicated.
Since the advent of the rave in the late 1980s, filmmakers have attempted to incorporate underground dance festivals into their works with varying degrees of success. Oliver Laxe has now graced us with a hypnotic party for the ages in "Sirāt," Spain's 2026 Oscar submission for international feature - a rave that isn't just eye candy but a central plot point, where a middle-age father (Sergi López) searches for his missing daughter as the world descends into chaos.
The gathering has the vibe of a pilgrimage, the preparations unfolding with quasi-religious grandeur. Several enormous speakers, arranged on a dance floor of sand, have the coldly inanimate majesty of the monoliths in "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), as if they were sonic portals, transmitting pulses from an alien dimension. The music that pours forth, composed by the electronic artist Kangding Ray, is magnificently transporting, and the ravers surrender to the beat with glorious delirium.
Just as "Sirāt" is a twisty thriller that takes you unexpected places on its tragic journey into the dystopian desert unknown, the heady filmmaker behind it, Oliver Laxe, is not your average interview. His fourth European feature, "Sirāt" is his breakout: It wowed critics at Cannes, shared the Jury prize, and won the Cannes Soundtrack Award for Best Composer for Kangding Ray.
For Fredric Jameson, for instance, while modernism "thought compulsively about the New and tries to watch its coming into being", postmodernism "looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds". The latter definition, encapsulating the cultural logic of late capitalism, is all the more intriguing in the context of music culture, since it has found so many breaks to play around with.
