Set in a domestic noir world of Los Angeles' Manhattan Beach in the 1940s, "Where Light Is a Place" is a lyrically devastating and inspiring portrait of a young girl coming of age and of a family in crisis.
It's 1948 and 12-year old Palmer McNeil's world of sand, sea, and Saturday matinees is not as idyllic as it seems: tar and polio lurk at the beach, a molester stalks the movie theater, earthquakes rumble, and treacherous rip tides reach for swimmers.
Inside her family's dilapidated beach shack, dwindling finances, the hallucinatory terrors of her mother's alcoholic delirium tremens, and the arrival of her psychic grandmother, crowd the struggling family.
Realizing at last that she does not have the power to hold her family together, she invents her own form of a surfer's initiation, and Palmer, the careful girl, risks everything in that great water so like the unpredictable future of adolescence that rushes toward her.