June Baby

June Baby is a gorgeous, lyrical love letter to women, exploring what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a lover, and a friend. It meditates on our inchoate yearning to find a life of purpose while not yet knowing what that means, and inspects which people and memories we get to hold onto in life and which we must let go of in order to move forward. 

At seventeen, Ruth’s mother has just died of cancer, and her father, unable to handle her grief, has shipped her off to Block Island with nothing but the name of a woman—Diana Beckett—scribbled on the back of a McDonald’s receipt. Diana is a successful photographer and she takes Ruth in for the summer and quickly becomes a second mother figure to her, introducing Ruth to art, creativity, the natural world and, in the form of Diana’s nephew, Charlie, first love. The island becomes Ruth’s refuge from a world she has trouble navigating.

For the next ten years  Ruth lives for the summers on Block Island working as Diana’s assistant.  She lives the rest of year in temporary apartments, waiting tables, checking engine lights, shells found in pockets, just scraping by until she can get back to the island each June.

After Diana dies and Ruth’s world starts to slip again. Looking for an anchor, she reaches for the person she’s been pining for since she met him—Charlie. But the day Ruth is going to finally tell Charlie how she feels, he announces that he is engaged. The wedding is in six weeks. And after a drunken one night stand with Louis, an old island flame, Ruth believes her birth control has failed, filling her with the fear of an unplanned pregnancy.

As the wedding approaches, Charlie and Ruth’s shared history continues to pull them together, and during a secret beach day when his fianceé is out of town, Charlie presents Ruth with a box from Diana. The contents in  the box raise questions about how well Ruth really knew the two women who raised her.  Ruth will confront her grief to break free.