Her Name Was Jo

Mary Cate Williams is Jo,a ten year-old girl whose mother has died and is living in Virginia with a drug addicted father. She leaves home with her best friend and they embark on a journey to find her biological father. They encounter a colorful cast of characters along the way. Williams is excellent and the supporting cast fine. The last parts of the film were a disappointment, especially a scene with Jo and a counterpart speaking to each other with only music playing without explanation. Subtitles are needed as the two girls are sometimes impossible to hear due to bad audio and too loud and annoying music in the background. The soundtrack is a major drawback; the singer ain't Bob Dylan. Overall, worth a watch for Williams performance.

Her Name Was Jo is a poignant, sometimes shocking, film that takes us through the journey of an impoverished, abused, neglected little girl who struggles to manage through a series of extraordinarily difficult situations. It's a film about pain and hope. Perhaps it's about the kind of people that are all but invisible in a society of fancy marketing and keeping up with the Jones'.

For those complaining about the soundtrack, I think they're missing an important point: This is the soundtrack of Jo's mind; the CD of her father's music and the only thing she has of him.

For many of us, this film is about every hope and sorrow that we crawled through on the way to somewhere... The human strength that propels us forward.

There was a definite church theme in the film, and it felt a bit like the 2 stark ends of faith and trust. One in which we see that faith seems to be fruitless and one in which we see that it embraces us nonetheless.

On a movie site that asks us whether our review contains spoilers, I AM DB manages to put a huge spoiler in their synopsis of this film, one which is intended as a surprise at the very end of the film or which, at the least, is something you slowly realize. Even the official Her Name Was Jo webpage doesn't indicate this surprise. So I won't either in the hope I AM DB will realize their error and fix their write-up.

I am not fond of children being the main characters in movies with the exception of IT lol but wow these girls were incredible. Joe is such a great character and it's so simple but so deep. Really pulls at your heartstrings and the bootstraps! I Really enjoyed watching that and never heard of it and prime popped it up for me and I am glad it did. It's so easy to look past someone and only see their behavior or facial expression or clothes or smell they have and never understand even on the furthest level how much unbelievable stress and grief and weight some of us carry and would never tell you otherwise. A sad reality in every aspect. Very well done film.

I hadn't any idea what this was about and didn't read anything here first, so pardon my ignorance, but I did not realize that the friend was imaginary until very late in the game. I thought this character a puzzlement due to poor writing. The laughs on me, I guess. This is a curious little film. On one hand, the events of this ten year old girl's journey alone (surprise!) across the country is beyond preposterous, but if you put reality aside, a lot of it is interesting & touching. It offers a very realistic performance by a youngster named Mary Cate Williams who carries this little film about a young girl in search of her father, and seemingly just about any woman who would offer her motherly love, as she has no parents and comes from a very troubled upbringing making her both way older, wiser and hard than her number of years on earth would normally allow. It's a difficult film to rate. On one hand it's touching, but on the other, it's unbelievable. The way the film is presented (backflashes near the end of the film to previously shown scenes with the friend no longer in the shot), I don't think viewers were supposed to know in advance that her friend was not real, so shame on IMDB for revealing that in their description. I'm glad I didn't read it. BTW, the sound quality is awful.

Back when my own children were 10 years old or so we made home movies with a portable VHS recorder. The kids were not trained actors and that is very clear. Same with this small movie, the two 10-yr-old girls who carry the story are mostly adequate but my wife and I were frustrated at times by their inability to speak clearly, this caused us to miss some of the dialog. Plus the background music was mostly too loud for the rest of the sounds.

Still I found it to be a worthwhile viewing. Jo is 10, with no mother and a stepdad drunk or drugged all the time in their little home on a small lake. She has to wake him up in the mornings. Until one morning he was unable to wake up. Coincidentally when summer break starts. Jo thinks her real father is an entertainer in Los Angeles so she figures she needs to make the cross-country trip, along with her "friend".

There is a significance to use of "her name WAS" in the title, part of her reinventing her life was to begin to use of her name Josephine. Her trip is a harrowing experience, but of course all fiction. The young actress is fine except for her often unintelligible dialog.

The end credits show that this was a family affair for the writer/director/producer & lyrics writer. I presume most of the "actors" are family and friends, from the last names shown.

No, by normal movie standards this is a pretty poor movie but I am glad I watched it, for its making me think about the plight that kids like this have when they find themselves in an unstable homelife. We found it streaming on Amazon.