In 2001, Fernanda was a 15-year-old Brazilian foreign exchange student in Mesa, Arizona, considered the USA’s most conservative city. 15 years later, and two months before Donald Trump’s election, she’s back to understand her experience there and to find an America between fiction and cliché.

Brazilian director Fernanda Pessoa makes a return to Mesa, Arizona, where she once lived, to study the city via the conflicted perspective of an insider-turned-outsider. With Arid Zone, she captures the eerie void of the contradictory landscapes on a journey that’s equally cathartic and eye-opening.