Oliver Laxe
(París, 1982) is a director, screen writer and actor who has become one of the most promising film makers of our times. This is confirmed by critics at the Cannes Film Festival, who have acclaimed and given awards to his first three pieces of work.
Despite being born in the French capital, Laxe identifies more with the people of Galicia, where he returned with his parents at the age of six. This link has been reflected in his work so far, especially in the film “O que arde” (“What Burns”, 2019), selected winner in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes and nominated for Best Film, Best Director and Best Photography Director at the Premios Goya.
For this film, which took the Galician language to Cannes for the first time, the director and his team - especially the director of photography, Mauro Herce - threw themselves with total committment into showing fires at first hand. To do this, they shared long fire-fighting sessions with the local firemen, filming very close to the flames, obtaining images that were at once very beautiful and breathtakingly harsh, as was recognised by the critics.
Laxe had already made two other films before this: “Todos vos sodas capitánes” (“You Are All Captains”), on the relationship between a young European film maker and youngsters he is filming in a care home in Tangiers, and “Mimosas”, a film that Laxe himself defines as a “religious western”, set in the Atlas Mountains, in which two young men must accompany a sheikh to find his family so that he can die among his loved ones.