[Spoilers Ahead] — Submerged in warm light, carefully stacked speakers are installed like a mountain range mirroring the rocky desert landscape. These speakers are the medium conducting the deep bass, which in turn crafts the dense atmosphere that will unfold throughout the film, a rough-edged techno sound of visceral intensity, provided by composer Kangding Ray. SIRÂT begins with the collective euphoria of a continuous party from night into day, in a remote location of a Moroccan desert. And with this, we immediately dive into the plot where father Luis and son Esteban distribute flyers concerning their missing daughter and sister to the revelers, accompanied by the pulsating score, as it carries us into collective exhaustion.

As they drive through the scorched landscapes, we hear fragments of the news unraveling on the radio: A war is taking place. The film does not specify exactly which conflict it is referring to, only that it could be the onset of the third World War. Something is happening, somewhere; populations are becoming migrants, and NATO is implicated. It is an ominous present unfolding in the background of the film’s main narrative, a parallel event that is heard through the news as the father and son follow our party-goers to the next rave.

When I watched the film for the first time, the German term Weltschmerz came to mind. This term, translated as “world pain,” encapsulates a form of existential despair and a continuous condition of a world in tension. Weltschmerz is the current world as we perceive it and the feeling resulting from the awareness of this world. It is accompanied by a strong sense of powerlessness, as we don’t seem to have any tangible tools to have an impact on the decisions our governments make and the unfolding humanitarian disasters caused by them. Depending on where one is located, we can be so geographically distant yet feel so close to disastrous events, as news of casualties perpetually stream into our smartphones.

“Is this what the end of the world feels like?” asks Bigui, one of the characters we follow in the film. “It has been the end of the world for a long time,” replies Josh. In SIRÂT, they do not appear to be directly confronted with the war, but hostility remains present in the menacing landscape of the Sahara. Disaster arrives when Esteban dies nightmarishly in the middle of the film, the car suddenly drifting and falling from the mountain road. The narrative tips into the realities shared by thousands in war zones, as his father falls into a state of unbearable agony: the loss of a child. What follows is akin to the collective anguish of a world in successive crises, and the emotional distress of witnessing these without being able to act, let alone grieve.

After the sudden tragic loss of his son, Luis expresses “There is only dirt here,” as he lies in the middle of the desert and sand is blown around him like fog. When we lose someone, a part of us dies with the deceased, the one world we create with each other, and which belongs only to this relationship. As further unexpected shocks will occur during the film, we may even begin to forget the main tragedy of the film: the missing daughter. Catastrophes supersede one another; as the music plays, landmines suddenly explode under Jade and Tonin’s feet. Grieving involves many stages before reaching a certain form of acceptance, but such a state following world tragedies seems to be beyond the bounds of possibility. If collective traumas are successive and imminent, how are we as a society supposed to look after one another, what tools are we given to support each other in such continuous calamities?

Director Oliver Laxe may have wanted us to still see a glimpse of hope when the travellers join forces to overcome the predicament. We must not forget that the history of raves started with marginal communities, and they were organized clandestinely, as anti-authoritarian spaces where bodies beyond the homogeneous mainstream come together. It would be tempting to qualify the ravers in SIRÂT as escapists, but the collective dance is a form of resistance in a hyper-individualistic world and a method of cooperation in the face of the unmanageable. As the film draws to a close, the two vertical speakers left behind not only provide the rhythm for the last dance of the film, but also act like a gravestone, a memorial at the site where two of the ravers lost their lives.