Deserts are harsh, forbidding places, yet they are also the birthplace of the world’s dominant religions, blank slates where countless novels and screenplays come to life, and vast expanses to test the limits of technological ingenuity. But to say this is a film about deserts is overly simple—it is a film about people, and about what happens inside the minds of those people when they inhabit desert wildernesses.

In this series of vignettes set in various deserts of the American West, we meet folk singers and rock and electronic musicians who have gained inspiration from their time there, people who seek spiritual enlightenment, and others—like marginal squatters or men who drive dune buggies at top speed—who use the expanse as an escape from civilization. But the film goes beyond being a sum of its parts; subtle editing puts the stories in conversation with one another until a common, humanizing theme emerges.  AK