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"Santa Ana" César Pesquera
César Pesquera
The Dark Winds of Santa Ana

The Santa Ana project aims to elucidate the link between evil and the famed Santa Ana winds, extremely dry down-slope winds in Southern California supposedly responsible for a tense, uneasy, wrathful mood among the people of Los Angeles.

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.

— CREDITS
A PANDORA: project
Produced by STORY: In Association with Wild Goats Creative
Directed by César Pesquera
Written by Kako Mendez, Christian López and César Pesquera
Art Direction: Christian López, César Pesquera and Kako Mendez
Executive Producers: Víctor Mata and Ana Laura Solís
Produced by Salvador Gutiérrez Chacón and Víctor Mata
Co-Produced by Cecilia Salguero and Aldo Chacón
Director of Photography: José Luis Bernal
Still Photographer: Javier Tles
Costume Designer: Mairi Chisholm
Editor: César Pesquera
Music and sound design: Nick Smith
Colorist: Marc Morató
Title Lettering: Marta Cerdà
CGI: Entropy
VFX: Lastcrit

Featuring: Enrique Escobedo, Pirate Mike Patterson, Sonia Herbert, David Aaron, Carlo Roncaciano, Brian Brown, Diane Yoder Reynaldo.