The Dust Never Settles

The Dust Never Settles is a haunting love story between two young souls who meet at the fault line of America’s deepening divide.



Ethan Caldwell, a privileged filmmaker from New York City, travels to a forgotten Appalachian town to document rural decay and social neglect. There, he meets June Whittaker — a coal miner’s daughter, surviving amidst poverty, addiction, and the slow death of her hometown. Fiercely intelligent and painfully self-aware, June hides poems in her notebooks and sees the world through the cracked lens of a secondhand camera.



Drawn together by curiosity and a shared longing for something more, they fall in love beneath firefly skies and flickering neon. But when their lives entwine, so do their contradictions — city and country, privilege and survival, storyteller and subject. And love, as they soon learn, is not enough to rewrite the narrative.



A tale of fractured America, The Dust Never Settles explores what happens when love tries to bloom in soil that was never meant to hold it.