El Salvador, 2005: a group of Canadian human-rights activists are taken hostage by a former revolutionary fighter who demands that a new gold mine stops production. For Danielle Byrd, the situation is all too familiar, as she was there twenty years previously as an embedded journalist with a guerrilla faction during the country’s civil war. Now, her daughter Aida must herself travel to the scarred landscape and choose her allies carefully if she wants to see her mother alive once more.

With character-driven action and imagery reminiscent of Georges Arnaud’s The Wages of Fear and a complex plot that recalls John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, Open Pit explores the legacy of violent conflict in a complex, shifting present.