Portland filmmaker Reed Harkness spent 25 years working on Sam Now, a complex, captivating documentary about his half-brother, Sam, and their search for Sam's mother, Jois (pronounced "Joyce"). In his directorial debut, Harkness sensitively explores numerous forms of family dynamics, including sibling relationships, abandonment, single fathers, extended families, generational trauma, cross-cultural adoption, and the immigrant experience.
Harkness, who grew up in Seattle, started filming when he was 18 with the aid of a Super-8 camera. Initially, it was just a way of having fun with energetic 11-year-old Sam, aka "Candybones," while engaged in a variety of antics, sometimes dressed as the homegrown superhero the Blue Panther. Though they didn't know it at the time, the footage would form the heart of this full-length feature, linking it with previous home movie-based documentaries like Andrew Jarecki's 2003 Capturing the Friedmans.
Throughout the film, Harkness combines past and present, black and white and color, and structures the narrative like a mystery or a detective story, because one day Jois is present and available for her children—and the next day she isn't. After her disappearance in 2000, when Sam turned 13, Harkness kept filming, except now it wasn't just about amusing themselves.
For years, the disappearance is a painful family secret until Harkness convinces Sam, then 17, that they should try to track her down and document the process. Along the way, he interviews their father, Randy, his other half-brother, Jared, their paternal grandmother, Doris, and other family members. All agree that Jois was a dedicated mother and that her sudden departure was unexpected. Afterward, the resilient Sam goes with the flow, but the more introverted Jared has a hard time coping.
It would be giving too much away to say whether they locate her, but their travels from Seattle to Long Beach, in addition to their dive into Jois's past, uncover facts about her childhood as the mixed-race child of adoptive white parents that help to explain the trauma she had been carrying. A different person might have acknowledged the pain and asked for help, but Jois chose another way, one sure to mystify many viewers, though Harkness never judges or theorizes, and it is to his film's benefit.
Sam Now is rarely as dark or as heavy as it sounds, since Harkness, with expert assistance from editor Jason Reid—with whom he grew up in Seattle—keeps the pace lively, mixes film stocks artfully, and fills the soundtrack with high-powered selections from local acts, like the Sonics, the Wailers, and Dead Moon. By the end, it's clear that the filmmaker, in many ways, has served as more of an uncle to Sam than a brother, with the documentary providing both catharsis and a strengthening of their bond.
After making the theatrical rounds in 2023, Sam Now aired as part of PBS's Independent Lens and on The Criterion Channel. It's one of the finest documentaries to emerge from the Pacific Northwest and one of the very best of the year.
What public library shelves would this title be on?
Sam Now would be a perfect fit for most documentary shelves in public libraries, particularly non-fiction sections dedicated to blended families, Japanese-American culture, and the Pacific Northwest.
What academic subjects would this film be suitable for?
Film studies courses centered on first-person narratives would benefit from Sam Now, which manages to be both personal and specific, but with relatable aspects for most viewers. It's suitable for middle school to post-graduate students.
What type of classroom would this documentary resource be suitable for?
Sam Now would be suitable for middle school, high school, and college/post-grad classrooms, not least because the filmmaker and his brother/subject start out as teenagers. By the end, they're both adult professionals; Reed Harkness would become a documentarian, whereas Sam Harkness would (and continues to) work in the fields of education, athletics, and social services.