Paradise Valley, Montana

Summer 2020

Story Synopsis

Stranded at her family’s secluded Montana ranch during the summer of 2020, Anji places an ad for a ranch hand to help out in her family’s absence. She soon meets Lu, a queer college student from Columbia University with dreams of escaping her family’s apartment and spending the summer out west. As the two spend the summer together, they grow closer to one another and fall in love while taking care of the horses and land in isolation.

Story Structure

We explore their relationships in two interwoven timelines. The first timeline occurs in July of 2020, when Anji first hires Lu, and they begin their working relationship together. We see them navigating COVID and the day-to-day chores required of the ranch and the horses. As they grow closer, they begin to fall in love and we see their relationship continually evolve, as they discuss their queerness and come to terms with their own shifting identities in the disruptive time of quarantine. They begin to plan for a rodeo to celebrate Anji’s brother's return home, but the tension of quarantine and the event eventually splinters their relationship. The second timeline occurs a month later, in the wake of their breakup, with the potential reopening of schools on the horizon. Anji’s brother Taran flies back from isolation in India after a family tragedy. Reunited with her brother, Anji must navigate her falling out with Lu while also rekindling her lost relationship with Taran. As Taran and Lu grow closer as friends, Anji must overcome her conflicts with Lu to maintain her relationship with her brother. These two timelines showcase how our main character Anji interacts with and deals with her changing relationships while isolated from the rest of the world.

Lu

Lu, a Columbia University student, saw Anji’s job posting for a farmhand advertised online and decided to leave her family home to get away for the Summer. Lu is from an Upper West Side family, and while she was given freedom in her queer expression from a young age, she struggles to further explore her identity surrounded by people who have known her entire life. She goes to the Ranch in 2020 to quarantine in a new place, hoping to spend some time on self-reflection, but is confronted with her own lingering feelings for a past relationship in conflict with her feelings towards Anji.

Taran

Taran is Anji’s little brother and is in school at Montana State, but quarantined in India with their family at the beginning of the film. While in quarantine, he started to explore his own queerness amid drastic personal and family changes. Taran begins to question what “going back to normal” really means. He is typically more involved in the ranch than Anji - living closer to home and with dreams of taking it over someday - but their changing roles over quarantine leaves his future uncertain. When he returns to the ranch, he forms a special connection with Lu which both evokes tension and a newfound closeness within his relationship with Anji.

Characters

Anji

During the COVID-19 pandemic, 22-year-old Anji finds herself tasked with taking care of her family’s ranch as they are away in India. Prior to quarantine, Anji had never considered her queerness as an important part of her identity. Despite some brief experimentation with her sexuality, she has never had a serious relationship, especially not one requiring her to come out to her parents. When the pandemic hit, her life drastically changed as she was forced to live in isolation, making her reevaluate the roles that her sexuality plays in her public and private life. During the film, she loses her grandmother, who lived with her and helped raise her on the ranch, to COVID without a goodbye.

Visual References

Visual Palettes

Inspirations

A Word

from

the Director

My relationship with my own queerness grew out of my early relationship with nature and spending my time outside with loved ones. I grew up in a small town in Virginia and spent much of my childhood in the mountains and Paradise Valley of Montana. Later, I found community during quarantine through riding horses with my mom and revisiting my connection with my family farm in isolation.

In my experiences, queer members of rural America are underrepresented in media, especially in a way that showcases the intersecting identities of rural life. My relationship with my rural home and my queer identity are often put into conflict, and I want to explore this complexity in my film to ultimately showcase that queer joy and community can be discovered in these sparse landscapes. Many rural queer narratives portray queer people leaving these spaces with the promise of finding community, but neglect the community that can be developed within them. Anji’s return home in Leaving Paradise resembles my experience being quarantined on my family farm and navigating tensions between family and identity in rural isolation.

- Bella C Sonen