SDIFF 2025 : Magic Hour Annnnd – action!

As her suburban hell life falls apart when her cheating husband asks for a divorce and her scornful college-age daughter brooks no sympathy, Harriet decides to pursue her lifelong dream of movie-making and goes back to film school.

The magic and wonder, and yes, the frustrations and tons of issues that come with making a film, whether it’s a 5-minute commercial, a 20-minute short film, or a feature-length blockbuster, is something everyone can appreciate. The movie itself is so very meta – it’s a movie about rediscovering an absolute love for making movies, no matter what obstacles or supposed age restrictions stand in your way. So check your sound, make sure the lightings’ good, give the clapperboard a great clack, and lets get into this!

So it seems New Jersey housewife Harriet Peterson (Miriam Shor), despite her determined, always-see-the-bright-side way of doing things, just can’t catch a break. Her young adult daughter Emma (Cameron Morton) has little empathy for her mom, letting people walk all over her, and that includes people like Dad, Bob (Josh Stamberg). And indeed, Dad’s been keeping a secret: his affair with Trish (Joy Suprano), her pregnancy, and his desire for freedom through divorce. Only to let it all come tumbling out during their supposed Anniversary dinner, hooboy.
To top it all off nicely, Harriet gets demoted at work, and that is the last straw, honey. As she walks despairingly through the wreckage of what’s left of her life, Harriet spies a gang of young filmmakers doing their thing out on the street, and suddenly Harriet remembers her own
long-suppressed dream – of filmmaking, directing, composing, doing everything to get that one perfect shot when the lighting is just right, known in the biz as ‘magic hour’.

Finding out that the house and accompanying payments are in arrears because Bob’s apparently been planning on getting out for a while is a significant setback for Harriet, but our heroine is determined. And after a few rounds with her financial advisor, Harriet’s literal “f*ck the house, I’m going to film school” attitude is a breath of fresh, cheerful spite and determination. Go on, girl, you rock that film school dream.

Film school inevitably turns out to be Harriet surrounded by younglings, mostly fresh high school and college kids with altered visions, maybe some talent, and delusions of auteur-ism.
Fortunately for all of them, the school itself makes no distinctions between skin color, gender, age difference, or class; it’s all about the enthusiasm and effort you put in, how you learn and grow, and grab whatever talents and skills you may bring with both hands, to bring your movie vision to life. Instructor Felicity (Delissa Reynolds) in particular teaches with passion and inspires her students to reach for those stars, reigniting the love of filmmaking that Harriet had been missing for some time now.

One of the first lessons of the film school has to do with knowing how to wind the now almost-obsolete film reel magazine, or magazine, and Harriet and the younglings manage to somehow bond over this. Plus, it helps that a very handsome and understanding man by the name of Hank (Sendhil Ramamurthy) runs the movie equipment shop with reel mags and
everything else just down the street from the school, and next thing you know, Hank is Harriet’s new beau. We’re talking a serious upgrade here, folks. Hank is patient and kind, encourages Harriet wholeheartedly, and hey, happens to share many of Harriet’s ahem passions.

Things are speeding up a bit and next thing you know, after a ton of work while enduring discouraging comments from a lot of people and some hilarious mistaken assumptions from her daughter, Harriet has won the film school fellowship prize that all the students were competing for, an internship at a big film studio, where she gets to make her movie vision come to life. The studio comes with all the big-movie equipment she could want, the resources and money and people to back it up, and even has a famous Director of Photography, Ted (Michael Panes), attached to Harriet’s movie.

Which is, of course, where the real-world realizations of being attached to a movie studio under contracts and things come crashing down into Harriet’s roseate vision, when Ted turns out to be an actual “professional asshole”. The phrasing, as gross as it may be, is entirely accurate, as Ted undermines Harriet at every turn; every direction Harriet makes is immediately overturned, and every time Harriet has any kind of emotional reaction to such disrespect, she’s accused of being entirely unprofessional. Everyone attached to the entertainment business has met the “professional asshole” at some point in their job, and Ted does a real good job at being the guy you want to see his ass get professionally beaten.

At this point, Harriet is so close to completing her life-long dream of making a full movie with her own vision, the one that so worked so very hard on, that she can’t let anything, not a jerkwad DP or a big label studio or any age-restricted crap, get in her way. Buoyed on by her
now-blended family, the ex-husband with his actually kind mistress and their infant, her daughter with her own aspirations but thrilled to see her mom shooting for her dreams finally, the wonderfully encouraging handsome beau Hank, the film school kids and even their burnt-out instructors, Harriet is ready to do everything she needs to, with as much help as those who love her can give too, to get that film made!

The film is rousing and charming, full of love from many differing sources, the passion that it’s never too late to chase your dreams, and enthusiasm for all the things and people that go into making films.

Sendhil Ramamurthy, who played Hank, and Anna Suzuki, who played Beatrice, one of the film school students, both attended a Q&A after the screening of Magic Hour at the San Diego International Film Festival 2025.