In a disorienting transition, Laxe brings us to a seemingly more modern place, where there’s a recruiting call for workers. At the film’s outset - which one might easily mistake for being set centuries ago - the travelers consider whether to shorten the distance by going through the Atlas Mountains, even though it’s not clear if that holds a route to their destination. The plot concerns a caravan in Morocco that’s escorting a dying sheikh to the medieval city of Sijilmasa, where he will be buried. Laxe’s first feature, “You All Are Captains” (which showed in Directors’ Fortnight in 2010), combined fiction and documentary elements, and he has said that “Mimosas” was inspired by his own travels with Saïd Aagli, who plays one of the main characters. Favoring longueurs by design, it is a decidedly noncommercial project that asks to be taken or left on its own terms.

Still, those familiar with the ethnographic works of Ben Rivers (who gets a thanks in the closing credits) and the films of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso (“Jauja”) will find much to admire in the movie’s combination of spiritual musings and stunning landscapes. “Mimosas,” the second feature from Morocco-based director Oliver Laxe, won the Nespresso Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Critics’ Week, and Nespresso isn’t a terrible idea for anyone who walks in without preparation for this minimalist travelogue and crypto-Western, which offers relatively few clues to its goals and intents.

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