"Radiography of the desert" pretends to be, by extrapolation, what "Radiography of the pampa" (the 1933 book by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada) was for the humid and fertile area of the country. The documentary, filmed in the Lavalle drylands and the Andean foothills, observes several characters and their jobs related to the most arid areas of the province of Mendoza: a pilot who enters the summer storms, bombarding the clouds with silver iodide to prevent hail from damaging crops; a fisherman from the Nihuil lagoon who barely survives in a polluted dam; a family of wells who build cisterns and irrigation wells in rural desert areas; and a geographer in search of Francisco de Hoces's journey.