Report from Cambridge Film Festival : A [non-spoilery] review of Sirāt (2025) [final proof]

Report from Cambridge Film Festival : A [non-spoilery]review of Sirāt (2025) [final proof]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2025 (23 October to 2 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 October

Report from Cambridge Film Festival : A [non-spoilery]review of Sirāt (2025) [final proof]

As with Pyre (2024), also seen and reviewed by #UCFF at Cambridge Film Festival 2025, the larger the screen on which one can seeSirāt (2025), the better : vivid landscapes and the scale of human-beings in relation to them are central to what informs and – if the unintended pun may stand – drives the cinematic purpose.

We open with shapes in close up that we may quickly comprehend, then draw out to an assemblage or array of them, in a place and a pattern that is extremely dramatic, but, as we will find, nothing (or little) will be or remain as clear as this for long.

During a title-sequence that, by caption, slowly starts to identify our players amongst hundreds of others¹, and then, in what initially and immediately follows, takes us more and more into a mix that is, deliberately, visually indistinct and obscure, we are perhaps already wondering – although we need not ! – how what we know so far, or have seen, can sustain another 105 mins :

Purely as perceiving viewers who nonetheless co-create an understanding of this film's world and reach, this is one metaphor for life amongst others. Such metaphors will prove to be various, be they ones involved with rebellious flight or foolish quest, or of emotional challenge, seeking to avoid conflict, or puzzlement mixed with the threat of likely annihilation.

An actor of the presence, range and experience of Sergi López* [https://t.co/gaS5ADXJqT] was vital 'to anchor' the cast of Sirāt (2025).

* Known to #CameraCatalonia audiences from La vida lliure (2017) or La propera pell (The Next Skin) (2016), let alone Pan's Labyrinth (2006).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 29, 2025

At the level of its cast, it is hard to think of anyone of the stature of Sergi López² who would have been more suitable 'to anchor' the small group of actors in this filmic endeavour – someone with a presence, but also a sense of wounding-because-wounded vulnerability [the literal meaning, or etymology, of 'vulnerable' (the link is to the OED)].

That said, and although López (as Luis) is vital to the success of Sirāt, it is cohesion and a congruence that he, with his son Esteban (played by Bruno Núñez Arjona), bring to the whole picture – just as, when in front of a canvas by, say, Kandinsky or Miró, an apparently intruding element, if obscured with one's finger or thumb, can in this way be seen to serve the purpose of balancing other elements in the composition :

These actors, with no or next to industry-level credits (outside t.v. series Arte Journal (1998)) [in the case, say, of Jade Oukid or Tonin Janvier], will almost certainly be unfamiliar, but are in no way less individually and dynamically central to all that we witness through and alongside them.

Sirāt comes to a close with an increasingly heightened strangeness, which maybe might, for those who had seen Woman at War (2018), have unhelpfully caused one to recall it. (Yet, there, it was as if the directions in which the script had taken off [or, perhaps, it effectively had already not taken us with it ?], of twins and an escape, had still led to a dead end where we saw what we perhaps knew peter out (or it just felt like a convenient cop-out³ ?).)

By contrast, the cinematic strengths of Sirāt (2025) help us stay what's a very harrowing course : it is a film that starts with existential confusion and, after journeying painfully, and shockingly, into the unknown ‒ into the unfathomable ‒ concludes in a mystery.

The cinematic strengths of Sirāt (2025) allow one to stay what's a very harrowing course :

It is a film that starts with existential confusion and, after journeying painfully, shockingly into the unknown ‒ into the unfathomable ‒ ends in a mystery.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 29, 2025

As seemed entirely apt, the whole credit-sequence played without the house-lights coming up⁴. (If anyone did leave during the closing-credits, they were respectful of that mystery, and of the mood at the end of and resulting from the film, and had left very quietly.) This practice lets us immerse ourselves in the long list of all who - whatever exactly it had been. Part of making what we had seen, part of the mysterious and eminently self-referential powers - as those of music itself are, and which this film celebrates conjointly ! - of cinema.

A few carefully placed, non-determinative film-references in Sirāt (2025), at #CFF44 :

Stalker (1979)

Lost Highway (1997)

The Sheltering Sky (1990)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 27, 2025

End-notes :

¹ Although, at times, the impression or illusion that there were hundreds or more did not seem maintained ?

² Known to #CameraCatalonia audiences from La vida lliure (2017) or La propera pell (The Next Skin) (2016), let alone Pan's Labyrinth (2006).

³ It certainly did not, although perhaps intended to be one, feel like an indicator that Woman at War II would happily pick up where it left off, but more like a cop-out of an ending.

⁴ To #UCFF, it is always appropriate and should be obligatory.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Report from Cambridge Film Festival : [Non-spoilery] responses to Pyre (2024)

Some [non-spoilery] responses to Pyre (2024)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2025 (23 October to 2 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 October

Some [non-spoilery] responses to Pyre (2024)

As one can perceive, Pyre (2024) needs to be seen on the biggest screen available, and it is, one suspects, a film that would bear watching again, even if one knows 'where it is going', because one would follow the journey differently, with a different attention, and would see or understand things afresh along the way.

We were told, when the film was introduced, that its principals, Padam Singh and Hira Devi, are not professional actors (and not a couple), but local to where the film is set, yet, without its very location, it would not simply be a chamber-play (even if some patterns of behaviour have become relational tics, which might remind, say, of dialogue in Beckettt's, Fin de partie (Endgame) or En attendant Godot (Waiting for G.).)

The film would not exist without its setting*, which is part and parcel of Bubu / Padam and Aama / Tulsi and of their (way of) life* : living where they do is part of them, and the scope of the film - even though it is not wholly linear - is, partly, a consideration of what that comes to mean. (Partly also, which it shows or presents (and does not seek to explain), are the connections in terms of daily practice, family and its norms, belief, topography and humanity.)


The principals and their tensions may feign some things, but they do not, and cannot, pretend about what has underpinned their life and what living where they do encompasses, involves and means. Taking us as we are, and where it does, each of the film's scenes builds on what preceded it. It may have one puzzling and guessing, yet its messages are true to our shared nature, even though it is in the world of another continent and culture.

Pyre shocks, and yet it does not shock, and is gentle in showing a marriage into its seventh decade where there are nonetheless warring, but loving tensions, and without lying about the harshnesses of living and of unsought change.

End-notes

* If so, it would not be so different from Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), although that tells – or attempts to tell ? – a tale of people alongside national politics (or, at any rate, a different kind of such politics).)


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)