Spain arrived at the 2026 Oscars with two nominations for ‘Sirāt’, Óliver Laxe’s film about a father looking for his daughter at a rave in the Moroccan desert: Best International Film and Best Sound (which it did not win, by the way, in either case). It was, on paper, a milestone with all that milestones entail in terms of headlines and coverage. But the story that ended up circulating on social networks and in newsrooms around the world was none of those. It was that of an early morning fight at a karaoke bar.
The anger. The New York Times published days before the ceremony an extensive report that used that incident as a common thread to explain the state of Spanish cinema. One night in September, Laxe confronted Rodrigo Sorogoyen (previously nominated for an Oscar) in a karaoke bar in northern Spain because he had learned that the latter had criticized ‘Sirāt’ at a private dinner. Sorogoyen admitted it bluntly: the film did not convince him, Laxe did not pay enough attention to his characters and he had made a wrong technical decision in a crucial scene.
Laxe responded by calling these criticisms “the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my life” and jokingly said that his interlocutor was not a good director, or as has been said in other apocryphal versions of the anecdote, that he was “a great director.” Sorogoyen’s reply, brimming with venom: “Thank God I am sure of myself. Because if not, I would kill myself.”
Gossip with subtitles. What’s notable is not the exchange itself, which both directors later downplayed as an informal disagreement. Sorogoyen laughed off rumors that they had come to blows, and Laxe said the two had joked about staging a fight. The artistic difference was “healthy,” said Laxe, because “the ecosystem of Spanish cinema is diverse,” he said in the ‘New York Times’, which curiously considered it the best possible hook to talk about the film industry.
The two Spains. The report used the karaoke anecdote as a symptom of a theoretical division in Spanish cinema: Laxe defends a transcendental and sensorial cinema, and Sorogoyen, a more realistic drama. Their artistic differences, according to the directors and experts consulted for the article, are the sign of a sophisticated and mature Spanish cinema.
How we got here. The article makes an interesting review of the trajectory of Spanish cinema in recent decades. For many years we have lived the legacy of the dictatorship, first as a visceral rupture, then as a processing of historical memory. When a new generation of filmmakers emerged twenty years ago with less debt to that part of our history, there was no industry to support them.
In recent years, several currents have converged that have made things change: subsidies that have incorporated female or minority perspectives into the sector, European co-productions and streaming platforms that have financed more and more risky projects (like Movistar+ has done with Sorogoyen’s)… Names like those of Laxe or Sorogoyen themselves, Carla Simón (Golden Bear in Berlin in 2022) or Alauda Ruiz de Azúa (Golden Shell in San Sebastián in 2025) are some of its many representatives.
In any case, the funny thing about the anecdote is not only that ‘The New York Times’ interprets it as a thermometer of the good industrial health of Spanish cinema, but that from Spain we have stayed with that part of the article. Because yes, Spanish cinema is very Spanish and a lot of Spanish, but not as much as a fight at dawn in a karaoke bar on the outskirts.
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