"NOSTALGIA FOR THE NIGHT"

Go here and watch the trailer:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/nostalgiaforthelight/

This is real.  Of it I'd love to learn more, and hope to see the movie; but this isn't the point:

O, how reality is so infinitely more 
creative than our imaginations!

The Atacama, by virtue of its simple geography, juxtaposes--generating a reciprocal, implicit allegory between them--the efforts of scientists gazing upward to space to find the origins of life to those searching the sand, digging downward toward their lost family, which task and object become their locus of self-identity.

I challenge you to find a fictional metaphor as poignant and original.