One of Them
2000 · 25m · Canada
Directed by Elise Swerhone
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, tender
High school senior Jamie confronts her own reactions when she learns her friend is gay and needs her support, while her boyfriend decides whether he will stand with her against homophobic discrimination.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a Y2K after-school special about tolerance, which sounds like exactly the kind of consensus-friendly material I'd normally pass on—except Swerhone refuses to let anyone off easy, least of all Jamie herself, and that refusal to sentimentalize the friend or the boyfriend gives the whole thing a bracing asymmetry.
Swerhone locates herself within the lineage of intimate coming-of-age cinema—there's a formal restraint here, a privileging of the ordinary moment over the dramatic gesture, that recalls the best of early Kiarostami and positions vulnerability as an act of formal precision rather than emotional surrender.
The film hinges on a single choice: shooting Jamie's internal reckoning in a kind of observational stillness, letting the camera refuse spectacle while her face does the work, which transforms what could be an ABC-movie-of-the-week into something that trusts the viewer's intelligence and the actor's discipline.