Harkness
Director: Maria Markina
Canada, United Kingdom, United States, 2024, 103 min
Shooting Format:Digital 4K
Festival Year:2025
Category:Documentary Feature
Genres:Music, Culture, Arts
Cast:Harkness
Crew:Writer: Maria Markina. Producer: Ed Barreveld.
Email:ed@storylineentertainment.com
Synopsis
Harkness, an enigmatic musician disguised in an alien-looking cloak and visor, is on a mission to launch an artistic revolution against the commodification of music that gluts the masses and starves the artists. While surviving on a waiter’s salary, Harkness transformed his mother’s basement into a state-of-the-art studio and spent years weaving together unique instrumental arrangements. Convinced that his music can “cure the world’s broken heart”, at 56, Harkness has only his 87-year-old mother’s unshakable faith to rely on as he gambles all his meager savings on his last chance to break into stardom.
In a playful observational style, the film follows Harkness as he releases his debut album, launches an elaborate online self-marketing campaign, cleans bathrooms in dingy venues prior to his gigs, fights his way through rejection, recovers from failures, celebrates first victories and sets out on a tour of a lifetime.
Trailer
About the director
Maria is a Russian-Canadian documentary filmmaker based in Toronto. She was a director, lead cinematographer and editor on her debut documentary feature “Harkness” (2024) for which she received the 2021 DOC Institute Breakthrough Rogers CBC Award. Maria obtained a degree in Journalism and Political Science at the American University in Bulgaria and holds a Master’s Degree in Documentary Filmmaking fromToronto Metropolitan University. Her graduate documentary film "Musya" explored the crimes of the Soviet regime in World War Two and exposed a government run campaign of covering up the forced repatriation of Soviet prisoners of war. In spite of the efforts of the Russian State television to discredit the film,Musya was added to Artdoc.media - an archive of documentary films created to support freedom of thought in post-Soviet countries. While developing a number of new projects with Storyline Entertainment, Maria works as a freelance DOP and editor and continuously collaborates with other Canadian filmmakers.
Filmmaker's note
When Harkness emerges on screen in a lilac gown and declares his 5-year life plan, forever work-in-progress and often scribbled on napkins and old receipts, - the public goes “Is he crazy?” and proceeds to speculate on the psychological issues behind such preposterous ambition and delusional determination. But instead of searching for a diagnosis, the film encourages the audience to embark on a reckless journey of a 56-year-old man who dreams like a 15-year-old boy, and, ultimately, looks inwards to rediscover his own wildest aspirations. The journey, however, is no cakewalk. As Harkness’ ambitions deplete his meagre savings and his elderly mom is thrown into the whirlpool of his mission, his siblings start seeing him as a financial burden and reprimand him for not being a “productive member of the human race”.
"Harkness" is a story of multiple pursuits: of fame, of happiness, of love, and, ultimately, of self-realization.
While the film provides a unique window into the universal challenges of making it in the contemporary music industry, it is also an intimate look into the tough decision of staying true to one’s vision of happiness despite the rules of a money-driven society. The second I walked into Harkness’ state-of-the-art studio, funded completely on a waiter’s salary, I was drawn to his armchair philosophy and infectious self-belief. I believe Harkness’ journey, reckless, imperfect, and, hence, massively relatable, can inspire the dreamers in all of us to take a chance on our life-long dreams.
One of the biggest regrets of the dying is, “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me”. As Harkness walks the thin line between self-realization and selfishness, the film explores the complex human experience of searching for happiness in a cradle to grave society. With rare intimacy and through absurd recklessness unheard of in the money-driven society, Harkness explores the artists’ dilemma and the need to create in a time when success has a dollar value and talent is gauged by one’s ability to appease the masses.
There is no point in denying that the world is hard - every morning news briefing can attest to that. Harkness is a tonic for our time, an alternative world that people can escape into and come out feeling reassured that, in the game of life, you can always turn the odds in your favour.