The Skeleton Coast runs along Namibia's Atlantic edge, a stretch sailors avoided for centuries and named for the bleached bones and shipwrecks scattered across its sand. The film follows this coastline south from Angola to the Orange River, a strip barely 200 kilometers wide backing onto the Namib, one of the driest deserts on earth at roughly 250,000 square kilometers. Cameras track wooden hulls rotting into the beach beside rusted metal wrecks still standing decades later, and pass through ghost towns left behind when diamond prospectors gave up on the desert. Inland, dunes over 300 meters high shift with the light, and the film settles into two communities who have made the aridity livable: Bushmen hunting with poisoned arrows on a days-long expedition, and Himba herders whose lives run on cattle and goats, marked by elaborate hairstyles and body ornament and by the esuko ceremony that marks a woman's passage into adulthood. Wildlife appears too, timed to the desert's brief seasonal bursts of life.