The bridge and its shadows: Sirāt (2025) as transboundary cinema and the persistence of the orientalist gaze

This article examines Oliver Laxe’s 2025 film Sirāt through the intersecting frameworks of genre analysis and postcolonial critique. Awarded the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the film follows European travellers crossing the Moroccan desert as an international conflict erupts, blending New Hollywood road movie conventions with European traditions of introspective journey narrative. Drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism, Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, and David Laderman’s road movie scholarship, the analysis argues that Sirāt exemplifies transboundary cinema while at the same time reproducing Orientalist representational strategies. The film constructs an imaginary Morocco emptied of cultural specificity, silences local voices, erases indigenous women from the visual field, and deploys colonial languages without acknowledging their historical weight. Its theological framing – invoking the Islamic Sirāt as the bridge over Hell – maps eschatology onto geography, sacralising North Africa as infernal passage and Europe as salvific destination. Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics illuminates how the desert functions as a death-world stripped of historical causality, where violence appears natural rather than political. The article concludes that Sirāt’s aesthetic achievements are inseparable from its representational politics, revealing how contemporary European cinema remains tethered to colonial imaginaries even as it crosses generic and national boundaries.