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A Cielo Abierto, a film by Mexican sister and brother codirectors Mariana and Santiago Arriaga, and written by their father, Guillermo Arriaga, follows the genre of the adolescent coming-of-age bildungsroman. The film premiered at the 80th Venice Film Festival. In this genre of literature and film, a trip, in this case a road trip, structures the plot. The film opens with a father and his younger son, 12-year-old Salvador, driving to the northern mountains of Mexico for a hunting weekend. There is a relaxed, easy, and loving relationship between father and son, as well as a sense of foreboding. While driving, the father asks for a drink. Salvador looks but can't find one. The father takes his eyes briefly off the road to reach back for a drink. There is a head-on collision with a tractor trailer. The father dies; his son lives.
Two years later, the family has been reconstituted. The mother has married a widower neighbor, and the family now includes an entitled stepsister, Paula. Her boyfriend is always there, clingy and looking for moments to make out. Both brothers have been displaced in their family. They are angry about this unwelcome realignment and the loss of their father. The older brother, Fernando, is obsessed with car wrecks. He prowls automobile scrapyards, developing an uncanny ability to assess each wreck for the number of fatalities in each crash. Eventually, Fernando discovers the vehicle in which his father died, exacerbating his anger. Salvador is sullen and preoccupied with catching precisely timed glimpses of Paula undressing. Salvador claims to not remember anything of the crash despite his brother's interrogations of him. Fernando has collected all the information he possibly can about the accident, including the name, address, and profile of the truck driver involved in their father's death.