The movie Black Wind shows the building process for the railways connecting the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja California in the middle of the desert, towards 1947. Between sandstorms, under a sizzling sun hitting the heads of workers, engineers, and supervisors, each character develops an untamable will to sow industry in this arid land. The absence of water and flora is total. The rails are fastened to the ground, segment by segments, while the men stay standing between the open sky and the soft, dry, volatile sand.
The barren land that propels the movie’s plot was partly recorded in the Sonora desert. Some of the scenes were produced in a region similar in attributes to that of northern Mexico, just next to the Federal District. During the shooting, the ecological reserve and bulwark of the last lots belonging to Lake Texcoco was a wide plateau of salty soil where there was no water, flora, nor urban developments for miles around. [...]