Institute History
Description
After winning the prestigious "Miss Juneteenth" beauty pageant, Turquoise Jones receives a full scholarship to college and believes in her future as a doctor. She embodies the promise of her community, as the pageant marks the annual holiday which commemorates June 19th, 1865, the day slaves in Texas found out they were free - two long years after the Emancipation Proclamation made American slavery illegal.
Fifteen years have passed since that beauty pageant, and all of Turquoise's young, happy and hopeful is gone. She is now in her mid-30's, having dropped out of college with an unplanned pregnancy and landed back home with her daughter's wayward father and her judgmental alcoholic mother who is now a born-again Christian. To make ends meet, Turquoise tends bar at an aging juke joint where all the customers remember when she won "Miss Juneteenth".
As a single mother, Turquoise struggles to keep her teenage daughter, Kai, on the right path. She enrolls her rebellious daughter in this year's "Miss Juneteenth" pageant as a way to ensure she stays out of trouble.
Turquoise quickly finds that the pageant organizers take joy in seeing how far the former beauty queen has fallen. At the same time, Kai seems more interested in participating in the school's dance team and chasing her high school crush than focusing on her studies ? a requirement to stay in the pageant. As the pageant nears, Turquoise fights to make sure that her daughter doesn't end up like her. But, she must first realize that she has to break the cycle of dysfunction in her own life to be the example her daughter needs.