Where Did You Sleep Last Night?
2001 · 22m · Canada
Directed by Cliff Skelton
Genres: coming-of-age, crime, drama
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
Teenager Jodie, bored with family, school, and friends, is drawn in by Silas, whose car, cash, and charm hide his work as a pimp. The drama shows how recruiters win a teen's trust and force her into a violent street life, sometimes within a single day.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A 22-minute recruitment thriller that plays it straight when it could've bent the form—Skelton's got the predatory mechanics down, but the film resists the genre subversion that would've made this genuinely unsettling rather than cautionary.
Skelton situates this squarely in the social-realist lineage of issue-driven Canadian drama, with the formal restraint and moral clarity you'd expect from NFB's pedagogical tradition, though the editing never quite finds the tension between complicity and documentation.
The film's entire grip lives in Skelton's decision to compress the grooming arc into a single day—that narrative compression, paired with the studied performance of trust-building, creates an almost unbearable clarity about how fast predation moves when the target is already looking to escape.