‘Time Passages’ weaves visual collage in pandemic-era meditation on grief and healing

There’s little you could do to spoil the film “Time Passages.”

That’s because descriptions and comparisons, even trying to put it broadly in the genre of a documentary, doesn’t seem quite right. 

A reviewer for RogerEbert.com, who gave it three and a half stars out of four, says of its strategy that at times it “substitutes a movie you’ve likely seen before for one you likely haven’t, but the movie you haven’t seen is amazing.” 

Kyle Henry is the film’s director. He grew up partly in Houston and went to Rice University and the University of Texas. He’s now a professor at Northwestern.

He joined the Standard to talk about the film. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Filmmaker Kyle Henry

Texas Standard: This story is about your mother, your relationship, about aging, about death. How would you describe it? 

Kyle Henry: I think it’s a coming of age for the third act of life. 

What I faced, what so many people faced during the pandemic but also during — I don’t like using the word, but I’ll say it — the “silver tsunami” that’s coming up of caring for aging adults with dementia and Alzheimer’s, you become the parent. You are in a new world and a new relationship, so it’s also coming to terms with the story of your relationship with your parent. 

You mentioned already the pandemic is part of the setting of your film. How much did that influence its making? 

I wanted to do a short film about memory and time and dementia because my mother already was in the later stages of dementia in 2019. [Before] the pandemic hit, a producer I knew from PBS contacted me and said, “We’re doing a series about the run up to the 2020 election. Do you want to be one of the people doing video diaries and their thoughts about the election?” I said “sure.” And then the pandemic hit. 

I, like millions of other people, had a mother trapped in an elder care facility. PBS, in its wisdom, thought maybe this isn’t the best time to do this documentary in a contentious year on the election, so they canceled that show. 

I was in so deep therapeutically – being able to record these calls with my mother and use my cell phone to record my diary entries of what we were all going through – that I knew, someday, it could reflect the experiences of millions of other people. 

I usually save my questions about audience for the end, but I feel compelled to ask up top, who did you make this film for? 

First and foremost, I’m an artist and I make the film for myself — to transform myself, to learn something about the world and become a better person. 

I really have faith at this point, at 54 years old, that none of us are unique. When we tell our stories with authenticity, specificity and drama, other people will be interested because we’re really not that different from each other. We all have this life cycle on this cosmic dimension plane of time and we’re interested in that, and each other, of how to navigate that with some grace. 

In some ways, the hope is to have an impact that people will understand what’s coming up for them, for their families, and to make sure they advocate for the kind of resources that we’re all going to need. 

You experiment with ways to put images to this story. Can you talk about how you thought about telling the story for viewers? 

I was a theater kid at Rice University, and I realized pretty quickly that filmmaking is also the art of seduction, that we’re asking someone to spend time with us and we better deliver something. If they think they know something, we need to deliver it in a way that it’s worth their time. 

Necessity is the mother of invention, and during the pandemic I had a very small crew. We all had to operate in unique ways, so I quickly realized I am one of the central characters in the film and I can show things to an audience in these, I call it “the theater of the mind,” like a black box sound stage where I’m having projections projected onto me or I’m sifting through photographs. I could use that to show time travel and go back through time and investigate these memories that were in our family archive.

I think memorialization is a really powerful healing tool, to go back to sift through these memories and to create some kind of memorial for those who have passed. Also, for me, it was a personal psychological healing journey to come to terms with grief, but I think people can do this on a much smaller scale with even a scrapbook that they put together. 

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My favorite moments – again, without spoiling anything – are when you enact a conversation with your mom that didn’t happen. I guess I wonder how you rehearsed, or whether you approached this as something where you really went with the flow? 

I had to find a way to talk to my mother after she had passed away about things that I wasn’t able to discuss while she was alive or even before the dementia struck and I couldn’t trust the memories that she had left anymore for answers. 

I used the Gestalt Empty Chair Exercise, which is from Gestalt psychotherapy. If you’re estranged from somebody, you can’t talk to them in real life, you set up two chairs, you sit in one, and you talk to the empty chair [and ask] the questions that you would like to ask this person that they can’t answer.

Then, the tricky part is, you move and sit in the empty chair, and you answer back as you think they would answer. 

In this case, it was the last thing that I shot in the film, so it was a bit of a seance, conjuring within myself the presence of my mother to heal something within myself and to let go. 

But the journey continued after the film was done. What’s your message for the after? How healed are you? How satisfied are you? 

It’s been five years since she’s passed, and I feel I am as healed as I ever will be when one of the most important people in my life is no longer part of my life. 

She’s with me, she will always be with me in my heart and in my soul, but I can’t call her up on the phone. In some ways now I am a parent figure to other people, and now I’m inhabiting the role that she carried so much for me, which was cheerleader, number one fan, encourager and also somebody who accepted parts of my personality and my identity.

I now wonder, as I approach my older years, what will it be about a young person’s identity that I need to accept? What will change my conception of the world?

I changed the conception of the world for my parents when I came out to them in the early ’90s, where they had to change the way they thought about the world because they loved their son. The relationship became blessed because we knew each other more as adults and not simply as mother and son.

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