Ruby in Paradise

After her mother's death, Ruby Lee Gissing leaves the small town where she lived for an off-season beach town in Florida. She finds work in a souvenir shop, moves into a cheap flat and tries to live without needing anyone. A brief relationship with the shop owner's son is followed by another closeness with a quieter man. In both, Ruby is asking the same question: is she choosing this life herself. Victor Nuñez's film follows not a plot but a woman constructing her own life: finding work, paying rent, deciding whose side to be on. The narrative moves through what Ruby writes in her notebook, and what she reads, who she listens to and the small decisions she makes accumulate. It is Ashley Judd's first leading part and the film made her career. It shared the grand jury prize at Sundance in 1993. The emptiness of the town out of season sets the tone of the whole thing.