The title of the collective catharsis with which Spain is vying for an Oscar this coming year refers to a word in the Qur'an that denotes the narrow bridge spanning the chasm of hell, which—if we’re lucky—leads us on to paradise. Sirat thus invokes the path a father and son trace through the desert in search of his missing daughter, who vanished at a rave in Morocco. But it also refers to the transformative, sensory experience the audience undergoes during the dark-lit ritual of cinema. Crowned with the Jury Prize at Cannes, this humanist, introspective, hypnotic, political and devastatingly raw road movie uses grainy 16mm film to capture the aridity of a wild journey through grief, complemented by a truly trance-inducing techno soundtrack.