THE SANTA FE FILM FESTIVAL

and playful softcore filling Muybridge’s life are ultimately more than enough reason to trot out to see it on the big screen, even if the technical choices on display can’t match the innovation of the film’s subject. (Siena

Sofia Bergt) Jean Cocteau Cinema, NR, 88 minutes

SAM NOW

Exposing Muybridge

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+ DEEP DIVE INTO THE JUICIEST PARTS OF PROTO-FILM HISTORY - STYLISTICALLY PREDICTABLE

Even if you don’t know Eadweard Muybridge by name, you’ve definitely seen a riff on the godfather of film’s galloping horse photos. Whether it was through the direct callback in last summer’s Nope, U2’s black-and-white music video for “Lemon” or The Matrix’s frame-by-frame bullet time, the look of his pioneering motion photography has seeped into—and stayed a part of—pop culture like little else from the late 1800s. Finding a fresh story in imagery so familiar is a tough hurdle—one Exposing Muybridge mostly manages to clear.

Beginning with a meta touch, the film lines up its talking heads in a single composite screen that echoes Muybridge’s multiple frames before bringing any one speaker to the forefront. Among the usual crowd of historians and scholars, Gary Oldman stands out—appearing not as a celebrity narrator (thank god) but as a Muybridge enthusiast and collector. There’s something refreshingly accessible about the way he gushes, “I like the aesthetic,” over a collection of the photog’s early Western landscapes. And it’s a relief that, in a doc with its fair share of Ken Burns-style pans over still images, there isn’t one primary authoritative voice guiding the viewer through Muybridge’s improbable life.

But Exposing Muybridge is undeniably at its best when it sits back and revels in the weird, problematic and telenovela-worthy details of its subject’s story, rather than trying to overlay a narrative arc on top of it. Superimposed chapter titles slow the story’s otherwise steady clip, and a single reenactment (featuring director Marc Shaffer as one of Muybridge’s assistants) feels oddly glorifying in an otherwise multifaceted film. But the murder, brain damage, propaganda

7

+ A COMPLEX TOPIC TREATED WITH RARE TENDERNESS - IT’LL PUT A WEIGHT ON YOU

Sam Harkness was a teenager when his mother left him and their family in early 2000. There was no note. There was no explanation. She was just gone. The Harkness family filed a missing persons report for Jois (pronounced Joyce). But the police said she was fine—she wasn’t being held against her will; she just didn’t want any contact with them. And for a while, even this seemingly loving, tight-knit family of educators in Seattle didn’t quite know what to do.

But after a childhood spent with his brothers staging increasingly elaborate home movies, Sam and half-brother Reed began to turn this mystery into a film—a sort of adventure movie, complete with a road trip and a costumed hero, The Blue Panther, who ends up on a quest to finally find his mother.

The brothers didn’t get the ending they expected, though, and the resulting documentary directed by Reed Harkness, Sam Now, turns out to be a moving and beautifully captured exploration of intergenerational trauma and new perspectives. After ditching the Blue Panther costume, the brothers come to find that Jois is on a search of her own after being adopted from a Japanese orphanage by a white American family after World War II. But perhaps the biggest question looming over everyone is: What answers are we really owed, particularly when it comes to family? Woven together from a rich trove of home movies shot over the course of years, Sam Now takes on complex questions with a youthful, sometimes naive innocence. The Harkness family goes vulnerable, relating tender honesty to tell a story of reconciliation and how families can come together after falling apart. The story might not be universal, but the themes certainly are. (Andrew Oxford)

Jean Cocteau Cinema, NR, 87 min.

BURNING LAND

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+ STUNNING LANDSCAPES; CHARACTER STUDY - MURKY MESSAGE; RUSHED RESOLUTION

Our view of the decades-long Gaza conflict ebbs and flows as news cycles shift, despite it being a

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