Good Things Can Still Happen
1992 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Liz Scully
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Lucy confides to her friend Kirby that she has been sexually abused, and the story follows the feelings that surface after disclosure. A narrative voice comments as the two children navigate what comes next.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects this to be therapeutic catharsis, a healing narrative—and Scully deliberately refuses that comfort, letting the unnamed narrator hover above Lucy and Kirby's confusion like doubt itself, which is genuinely unsettling in ways most disclosure films won't risk.
A formally rigorous approach to interiority: the voice-over as ethical constraint rather than omniscience, the composition of two figures in space registering what's unsayable, positioning this 1992 film in conversation with experimental documentary and the Canadian avant-garde tradition of witness without resolution.
The decision to keep the narrator unnamed and perpetually uncertain—never quite settling into wisdom or guidance—means every silence between the girls carries the weight of what an adult *isn't* saying, and that structural restraint is what makes the 21 minutes feel necessary rather than processed.