Stranded at her family’s secluded Montana ranch during the 2020 pandemic, Anji places an ad for some additional help around the property. She is shocked when she actually gets a response, and soon she meets Lu, a gender ambiguous and college student from Columbia University. As the two spend the summer together they grow closer to one another and fall in love. We explore their relationships in two timelines, one as they fall in love and another future timeline where we explore how the relationship has changed over time.

The story focuses on the waxing and waning character development through the two interwoven acts. One timeline takes place in July 2020 where Anji and Lu are alone together on the ranch and the other in August 2020 when Anji’s sister and parents have returned home. We watch these two strangers grow together and form a relationship, but by the end of the story they leave as distant as they began.

The story draws from Hindi texts such as the Ramayana for motifs and follows a circular structure in the narratives of both acts where the starting and ending leave the characters in similar positions with only the passage of time to mark the difference.

Lu (Eloise) Barrett is a student at Columbia University in New York who saw the position for farmhand advertised online and decided to leave her family home in New York to get away for the Summer. Lu is from an Upper West side family and while she was given freedom in her expression from a young age it was always tied to an expectation of respectability.

Anji, an NYU senior born and raised in Paradise Valley has 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 is forced to live in isolation. During the film she loses her grandmother, who lived with her and helped raise her on the ranch, to COVID without a goodbye.