In his debut You Are All Captains (2010), Óliver Laxe blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction, probing questions of authorship and control, with creative agency at the core. Half a dozen years later, with his sophomore feature Mimosas, he shifts toward the spiritual testing grounds of the metaphysical, where characters grapple with doubt and destiny. Three years after that, in Fire Will Come (read review), Laxe moves from Morocco to the Galician region of Spain, exploring exile and ancestral ties through themes of guilt and forgiveness. His gut-wrenching, heart-filling fourth feature, Sirāt (read review)—critically acclaimed at Cannes—turns its attention to humility and humanity in the face of something vast and ineffable.… Read the rest
“The Zone wants to be respected. Otherwise it will punish.” Aleksandr Kayadonvsky’s line from Tarkovsky’s existential sci-fi classic Stalker (1979) comes to mind when viewing Sirat, the fourth and arguably most accessible feature from French-Spanish director Óliver Laxe, who once again returns to the metaphorical glories of a spiritual odyssey as previously explored in 2016’s Mimosas. But his latest is a pulsating, techno drenched mixture of mythological soul searching and contemporary intentional drug use all catalyzed by the search of a missing young woman. Layered, almost kaleidoscopic metaphors evolve through religious and politically minded themes, and the end result feels like a Gaspar Noe adaptation of 
How can anything else hold your focus when you’re watching your country unravel before your eyes? There are the type of altruistic people that will happily (and heroically) put others before themselves even if it means sacrificing their own safety and comfort. This emphatically applies to the courageous directing tandem and subjects in Lebanese Arabic BBC correspondent Janay Boulos and Syrian photographer and activist Abd Alkader Habak. By placing the focus on their slow, tentative romance amid war, Birds of War shows how an intimate love story can coexist with far larger, more harrowing realities, from the oppression of the Syrian regime to political unrest in Lebanon.… 
With immigration unlikely to fade as a pressing issue in the U.K. anytime soon, Chilean-Belgian filmmaker