The Burning Plain: The Shooting Script

A trailer home burns in the middle of an isolated desert. Something has happened inside...something that will haunt many over the coming years.

From acclaimed writer Guillermo Arriaga comes a multilayered drama in which six people separated by time and space discover that the past and the present have a curious way of affecting them: Mariana and Santiago, teenagers in a small New Mexico town, attempt to understand through forbidden love the mystery of the tragic end of Mariana's mother and Santiago's father; Sylvia, a troubled woman living in Portland, undertakes an emotional odyssey to resolve a sin from her past; Gina and Nick grapple with their intense, clandestine affair in the New Mexico desert; and Maria, a young Mexican girl, helps her mother find forgiveness and love.

The story of The Burning Plain explores many themes that are constant throughout the work of Guillermo Arriaga: the weight that the dead exert over the living; the paradoxical nature of love; alienated characters in search of identity; and people with physical and emotional scars who come from the dark extremes of life with the hope of finding redemption.

"The structure of The Burning Plain," says Arriaga,"differs from other films I have written in the sense that this is only one story, but told through different time frames. We watch the characters for a period of around twelve years. I wanted to create a story of connections and consequences. What a character does one day has repercussions another day many years later."