In this poetic, richly allegorical debut by Colombian director William Vega, a teenage girl flees to a rundown inn after being driven from her home in the Andean highlands by civil war, as the violence engulfing the country creeps ever closer to her remote refuge. (TIFF)

Sal is an odyssey whose hero has no home to return to. His is a search for transcendence in a landscape that pits him against a harsh, impervious human reality. Heraldo is a man with no identity who comes to the desert asking about his father. In this dystopian land, the last refuge of desperados who have no place in the world, he finds himself asking if maybe he is one of them when a strange couple, Don Salo and his wife, take him in.