The power of the image — photographic, filmic — is a key theme in Joshua Erkman’s haunting, dread-drenched debut, which knows all too well how (moving) pictures can preserve the past, stir memories and fuel our dreams and desires. For a movie that opens in an abandoned cinema and possesses a strong meta dimension throughout, it’s only fitting that A Desert proves so potent, its mood and meanings impossible to shake.

In an effort to recapture his past, picture-book photographer Alex (Kai Lennox) is travelling through the sand-blasted wastelands of southeastern California, snapping pics of discarded housing developments, vacated military bases, fly-blown junkyards, forlorn pet cemeteries and, yes, forsaken movie theatres. He’s holed up in a budget motel when a disturbance in the next room

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