For What it's Worth

A spiritual journey through the Sahara, a violent, alien transformer, and a NYC man who may have strayed in the wrong direction.

“Sirât”

This sprawling wonderment from director Óliver Laxe unfolds as a stark meditation on faith, displacement, and moral endurance. Set in the harsh, borderless landscape of the endless Moroccan Sahara — and its precipitous mountains — a father and son go looking for their missing daughter/sister who’s last been seen embedded with a nomadic rave collective partying its way through the vast, arid nowhere. The film’s spiritual journey is shaped as much by silence and ritual (the rave parties are transfixing) as by events that often startle and shock. Laxe frames fate and belief not as certainty but as friction between devotion and doubt, discipline and compassion, and isolation and responsibility. Beneath its austere beauty, “Sirât” (loosely meaning the path to spiritual enlightenment or paradise) engages quietly but pointedly with contemporary political tensions, touching on migration, gender identity, radicalization, and the fragile line separating faith from ideology.

Driven by a pulsating techno score from David Letellier, known professionally as Kangding Ray, “Sirât” resists easy allegory while allowing meaning to emerge through gesture and repetition. The ensemble’s nuanced performances are restrained and inward, grounding the film’s metaphysical inquiry in palpable human vulnerability. \

Alain Kassanda, Congolese French filmmaker

Alain Kassanda‘s documentaries take personal stories and make them confront and reframe history, exploring matters of identity, race and power.

Kassanda‘s films will show at Harvard University this weekend, part of his residency as this year’s McMillan-Stewart Fellow in Distinguished Filmmaking. The fellowship, jointly hosted by the Harvard Film Archive and Harvard’s Film Study Center, brings internationally recognized filmmakers to campus for screenings, classroom visits and public conversations. He spoke with Cambridge Day at the beginning of his residency.

His first feature, “Trouble Sleep,” (2020), showed Friday. His second film, “Colette and Justin” (2022), shows tonight at 7 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive. His most recent, “Coconut Head Generation” (2023), will screen Monday.

The works together trace a line from European colonial rule in Central Africa to modern protest movements shaped by globalization and economic extraction. Though Kassanda’s scope spans Congo, France and Nigeria, his starting point is personal. Born in Kinshasa, at 11 he left the Democratic Republic of Congo for France. In Congo he felt he was seen as French and in France as Congolese — a duality that would become the emotional engine of his filmmaking.

As a longtime cinephile, Kassanda’s path to filmmaking began when he worked selecting movies to show at a small theater outside Paris. “I became a film programmer by accident — out of love for films,” he said. These were films being released in France. What struck him were how people of color were portrayed as stereotypes, “as a Black French man, I couldn’t see myself in French films. The stories I wanted to see simply were not being made.”

“Colette and Justin,” his first hour-plus film, was driven by the loss of his mother at 12 and his dual identity. He began interviewing his grandparents about their life in the Congo in the 1950s and 1960s. That became “Colette and Justin” (his grandparents’ first names). “Making the film began with acknowledging my own ignorance about my family and my country,” he said. “The film was also a way of learning who I am.”