Until the mid-1990s, the Hargrove family had an unusual, peripatetic lifestyle. Thomas Hargrove’s work as an agricultural journalist took them overseas to the Philippines, and in 1991, to Cali, Colombia. This was a welcome change for the family. His two sons, Miles and Geddie, were in their teens and hungry for new experiences, and his wife, Susan, had spent much of her childhood abroad and was as possessed with travel fever as her husband. While working for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Hargrove had ample opportunity to pursue his lifelong interest in eradicating hunger worldwide, and his family settled into the new location with enthusiasm.

In 1994, a split-second decision to take a shortcut while driving alone brought Tom into the hands of the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and they demanded $6 million in ransom. His company refused to pay any of it, therefore the burden of saving Tom fell on his family. The kids dropped out of college to see their mother through this process, and Miles, the eldest, kept a video diary of this tense period during which his family negotiated with Tom’s captors. It forms the bulk of this illuminating and incredibly suspenseful documentary. 

Fashioning a feature-length film out of raw home video footage is a precarious endeavor, no matter how gripping the subject. While Miracle Fishing: Kidnapped Abroad is, of course, not a masterpiece of cinematography, director Miles Hargrove has nevertheless built a coherent film out of 11 months of material, one that makes his family’s experience palpable and moving and commands our attention throughout.

Kidnapping, we soon learn, was so common in Colombia in the early ’90s that it had become, in FBI agent Oscar Tejeda’s words, “a way of life.” The rate of abductions per year had, by the end of the decade, climbed as high as 3,700. Saving Tom Hargrove was a complex operation, one that involved many people (some of whom are specialists in hostage negotiations), many rounds of negotiation, and a lot of money (the sources of which can still not be revealed).

Several family friends, including the Hargroves’ next-door neighbors, joined in to help with the proceedings and therefore lived for nearly a year alongside the Hargroves in a perpetual state of suspense, waiting for “proof of life” photos and other such communications from the guerillas. Voice-over interviews with the family and their friends explain action and context so that, no matter how disjointed it feels to watch so much raw video, we are never confused. 

Much of what we see is the daily lives of this small community, and it is moving to see them form a sort of temporary family dedicated to saving Tom, as well as how they manage to keep their spirits up in offhand moments, despite how truly horrible the ordeal and its aftermath must have been. If the director achieves one thing alone, it is his ability to make us feel the strength of the family’s persistence and the depths of their fears. Thomas Hargrove died in 2011, Susan Hargrove in 2009. This film is a fitting testament to both of them.