‘Sirāt’ Sound Team Kangding Ray and Laia Casanovas Discuss Creating a Spiritual Soundscape on the Highway to Hell [VIDEO INTERVIEW]
There are few films like Sirāt that immediately and completely immerse you, transfix you, then linger in your mind months after viewing. The seemingly straightforward tale of a father travelling with his son in search of his missing daughter slowly transforms into a treacherous, existential trek between raves in the Moroccan desert. The arid setting makes for an unexpectedly rich canvas as the layered soundscape mixes the volatility of nature with a consuming, trance-like score to elevate the physical journey to a spiritual one. Oliver Laxe’s visceral cinematic experience touts an international co-production between Spain and France, including having a diverse cast of professional and non-professional actors from Morocco and Spain where it was also shot.
As Laxe’s fourth feature film and fourth premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Sirāt also marks Laxe’s fourth win at the Festival. His bold, immersive storytelling, alongside frequent screenwriting collaborator Santiago Fillol, won the Jury Prize, Soundtrack Award for Kangding Ray, and the Palm Dog Jury Prize for its two honorable canines. The award winner has also been chosen as Spain’s contender for Best International Feature at the 98th Oscars.
I had the privilege of speaking with composer David Letellier aka Kangding Ray and sound designer and supervising sound editor Laia Casanovas about their years-long collaborative process bringing this film to life. The French-born Berlin music producer and artist Letellier discusses how his earlier music inspired the dark, grainy sounds in Sirat and how his experiences performing around the world both compared and contrasted with composing a score. Casanovas’ dense and versatile career includes being supervising sound editor on Parallel Mothers which earned her a Goya Award nomination. She shares in depth how sounds and music were manipulated and edited to create a heightened world that would evoke a strong emotional response.
As unconventional it may be to have the majority of the score completed before filming, they explain how it helped actualize some of the film’s more experimental elements and add texture to this important filmic language. Sirāt is an impressive example of how skillful atmospheric control onscreen greatly influences the many ways a movie can be interpreted.
Sirāt is currently in select theaters and will be released wider by NEON in January 2026.
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