The Santa Ana winds are extremely dry down-slope winds that originate inland and affect coastal Southern California and northern Baja California. They are commonly portrayed in fiction as being responsible for a tense, uneasy, wrathful mood among the people of Los Angeles. Some of the more well-known literary references include the Philip Marlowe story Red Wind by Raymond Chandler, and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

After Tramuntana, a film about the famed Tramuntana wind in the Mediterranean sea, César Pesquera (director) and Christian Lopez (art director) teamed up with Kako Mendez (writer) and Javier Tles (photographer) and ventured into the desert with the help in the production of Story: (Barcelona) and Wild Goats Creative (Los Angeles). This time they were in search of the link between wind and evil, violence, fear… Once there they constructed a series of visual allegories and collected testimonies of a group of characters who live and consider the desert its natural habitat. The material give rise to the project Santa Ana, formed by a film, a book and series of photographs.

The film and photographs were shot in the desert of Nevada and California, very close to the border with Mexico, an area where Mexican illegal immigrants try to cross to US soil. Santa Ana is ultimately a project about evil, violence and fear using the wind and its cultural connotations as starting point to investigate the relations between the inhabitants of the USA and their environment.

Despite of investigating the wind’s literary and supernatural connotations the project is very connected to the reality of a country where the conflicts derived from racial tensions and immigration are evident, now more than ever.