SXSW ’26:“One Another” Celebrates the Ebbs and Flows of Friendship
The friendship bracelet is a badge of honor. It’s just braided fabric that’s easily given in adolescence, but it’s a symbol of belonging, connection, and a bond that cannot be broken. When you’re young, friendship feels so easy. As you get older and childhood connections are lost along the way, friendship becomes more difficult to find and to maintain. Amber Love’s SXSW-premiering documentary, One Another, is an exploration of a number of friendships in various stages of existence. While each one looks different and presents itself in a singular way, what remains is the universal human need to connect with someone.
The first subject we meet is Joe. He’s by himself in a park, listening to bird calls. He points to a group of birds in the sky and explains that while this species doesn’t fly in a uniform manner like geese, “they are helping each other to fly better.” This simple statement is inadvertently the thesis of One Another. People, and birds, are better together. Another subject, Giorgia, reflects on a decades-long relationship from her childhood that she broke off, but misses. Lastly, there’s Lorri, director Love’s mother, who wants to make new connections, now that she’s an empty nester.
courtesy of One Another
One of the constants of all three of these friendships is that they’re undergoing a fundamental shift. A sense of closeness has dissipated, and what remains is a chasm. Giorgia and Lorri have a break-up element in their relationships. That, in itself, is a painful thing to experience, but Joe goes through something different that’s heartbreaking in its own way. There’s no fight or straw that breaks the camel’s back, but a slow drift away from one another. That’s immensely difficult to process because there are no underlying feelings of anger, just a wave of loss for what once was. That’s much harder to capture and explain in words, but Joe and One Another do an excellent job of explaining this transition.
“I don’t know how to come back from this,” one of the subjects says. One Another is a celebration and a mourning of the platonic relationships that exist to buoy us through life. Giorgia has a large bag of letters that her friend of many years has sent to her, but the correspondence has stopped. That bag sits in her closet, a reminder of a connection that has fractured. Is there a chance for reconciliation? Will this relationship ever make its way back to what it once was? That’s the reality at the core of One Another, a thought exercise that has likely plagued all of us when an important relationship was on a precipice. Can we come back from this?
Throughout the documentary, purposefully or not, water imagery appears time after time. It speaks to the idea that people and relationships can ebb and flow. These bodies of water, or friendships, may look the same, but the water has changed, just like the people in these relationships. One Another is gently intimate in its genuine curiosity about the dynamics that are essential to our happiness. Humans are creatures of connection, we crave it, yet we’re afraid of it. Maybe it’s a lingering side effect of our early survival days, but we fear that if we expose our insecurities, we will be banished. One Another is a fight against those fear-based actions that lead us to isolation rather than connection.
Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Letterboxd, TikTok, YouTube, & Facebook. Check out Movies with My Dad, a podcast recorded on the car ride home from the movies and I Think You’ll Hate This, a podcast hosted by two friends who rarely agree.
support your local film critic!
~
support your local film critic! ~
Beyond the Cinerama Dome is run by one perpetually tired film critic
and her anxious emotional support chihuahua named Frankie.
Your kind donation means Frankie doesn’t need to get a job…yet.