How Spanish Oscar hopeful ‘Sirât’ threw the year’s hottest rave

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.

For Laxe, who has been embedded in the nomadic rave scene and free party movement for decades, authenticity was key. His team worked with production designer Laia Ateca and two different collectives, Trackers and Drop’in Caravan, to bring the party to life. After a deep dive into the peak rave scene of the 1990s and early 2000s, Ateca took a weekend research trip that opened her eyes to the culture. There was one element her boss was adamant about, however. He wanted a gigantic wall of speakers, a wall of sound that matched the walls of the mountain surrounding their location in Rambla de Barrachina, Spain (standing in for Morocco). However, in order to capture the true spirit of a contemporary rave, the production had already agreed to stage a three-day event essentially run by the collectives. That meant compromising to make it as real as possible.

“Don’t stop the music for four days. Don’t overlight because the rave mood needs to be intimate at night — so we couldn’t put cinema lights. It would break the mood,” Ateca notes. And if the requirement that the film use the collectives’ usual speakers at first gave them pause — they “were a little bit smaller than what we wanted” — Ateca soon had evidence that size doesn’t always matter: “I have videos at the bar, which is not on the dance floor, and you can see the waves of the sound [in the drinks]. The speakers were so loud, you don’t need anything else. It’s very, very powerful.”

Laxe says his cinematic flourishes come from images, not necessarily narrative ideas. One image he was fixated on for the rave was a laser going through the mountain, following the line of the sound and then becoming two boxes. It turned out to be no easy feat to pull off, especially when a CG version didn’t pan out.

“We started to do tests with lasers, and we realized that the mountain, it’s much farther away than what it looks like,” Ateca says. “There were like six huge lasers, and they could burn people’s eyes, so we had to put in security and not allow people to walk around the area where the laser was going. We had to build a tower to put the lasers on top, so it’s not dangerous for the dance floor. It was a huge thing.”

Beyond financing requirements, one of the reasons the production shot the rave in Spain was to have as many real people on site as possible. Even with approximately 1,000 ravers in attendance, Laxe experienced a tinge of disappointment: He was optimistically expecting 3,000. (For their part, producers were afraid that 2,000 would show.) As Laxe explains, “They are not on the dance floor all the time. 1,000 people? Half are in the trucks or they’re sleeping. But it was enough.”

A rave is nothing without a beat to bring it to life, and that responsibility belonged to the film’s composer, Kangding Ray. The acclaimed French electronic music artist was at the event and actually DJ’d a long set during filming. The music that begins the movie and dominates the rave sequence is titled “Amber Decay,” a previously released track he remixed for Laxe, making it “a bit faster, a bit dirtier.”

Speakers reverberate in the mountains during the rave in “Sirât.”

(NEON)

“Funny enough, this track is more than 10 years old and there have been numerous license requests,” Ray says. “It has over a million views on YouTube. I mean, it is definitely my most popular track, but there’s been some requests for licensing, and I’d never said yes.”

During the rave, Laxe admits he began to think that maybe they had crossed a line artistically. Inevitably, some ravers got a little too high, and that wasn’t something he wanted to show in the movie. He also thought the production might be “stealing their intimacy” a bit. But after three weeks of shooting, as the Spanish portion of filming came to an end, he wanted to celebrate and party too.

“When the sunrise arrives, suddenly I noticed that there are people with cameras in the dance floor,” Laxe recalls. “And I was totally aggressed. I felt like they were breaking something in the dance floor. And at some point, I noticed they were my team, because we had a small second unit and I forgot that they were still shooting. … I organize a party to be shot, but at some point I get lost into this reality that I want to capture. So I’ve been shot by the film, because I didn’t want to stop. But I had the feeling like if I was creating a monster, a Frankenstein.”