DESERT RAIN
By Wallace Dorian

"Desert Rain" is an unusual road drama about an award-winning documentary filmmaker named Cynthia Ryan, who is on an odyssey of self-discovery. I also take her into her "heart of darkness." But unlike Joseph Conrad’s famous classic, Cynthia’s journey takes her into America’s southwest while making a film on the mystical Hopi Indians, their lore and their prophecies.

Using the formula of the journey, I attempt to bring a kind of epic scope to this contemporary western while at the same time sharing a somewhat apocalyptic vision of the future that ends on an optimistic note. Thus, while the story is told through Cynhia's weary eyes, it is also told through Mary, a half-Hopi eighteen-year-old who not only represents her culture, but a generation that seeks it’s own self-identity in a world that has become more technologically complicated while fraught with an uncertain future.

In the midst of all this comes Jack Carlson, Mary's estranged father who is a rodeo cowboy drifter whom she has not seen in nine years. Cynthia and Jack also meet and it is through Jack, acting as Cynthia's guardian angel, that she comes to grips with the ghost that haunts her past. This past forms the haunting climax of “Desert Rain.”