Doc Days 2024 film festival offered the film directed by Kyle Henry Time Passages. Now, it is available for viewing at special screenings at the AFS Cinema from March 28th to 30th, with Kyle Henry available for a post-film discussion after each screening.
About: A pandemic rages across the globe. In the final months of his mother Elaine’s late-stage dementia, gay filmmaker Kyle Henry uses his extensive family archive to travel back in time, exploring the complicated bonds of identity, history, and belonging in his large Texas family. Charting Elaine’s promising early life through her years of motherhood and self-sacrifice and finally tracing their relationship to its inevitable end, Time Passages playfully explores Kyle’s conflicting feelings of love, grief, guilt, and helplessness. Beneath the Kodachrome smiles and grainy Super-8 home movies lie the difficult truths that so many families hide. With their unearthing, Time Passages becomes a memento mori: a testament to love, legacy, and the things that carry us through life’s most challenging times.
The post-film discussion will have the following moderators: March 28, Hannah Varnell; March 29, Ziah Grace, Film Programmer; and March 30, moderated by Professor Nancy Schiesari.
This documentary is a beautiful film by a son who recalls so much about his mother and family through the videos and photos taken over the course of the years. Kyle does an excellent job of telling his mother’s story through the video she sat for earlier in her life, photos of when she was young, and recordings of what she was willing to disclose. She spoke of her life at work and college, meeting her husband, and having five children, with Kyle being the youngest, with who she was very close. There is no denying that the film can bring about emotions such as grief, as well as bring about memories that may have been suppressed about Kyle’s father, from her memories and those Kyle recalled.
He also shares the time he came out to his parents in the 90s and their reactions at the time. Seeing him explore the family relationship is very good, especially when his mother shares so much about his father and their marriage.
The film is one that can make one think about one’s own family history and archives. What might you do with that information?
USA, 2024, 1h 26min, DCP
Source: Austin Film Society Cinema, timepassagesfilm.com