HFC at Doc Days '24: Time Passages

The grief of losing a parent is as ubiquitous as it is unique. Most of us will, inevitably, experience that loss; we are not alone in the experience, but our feelings about it, our relationship with our parents, can be something deeply individual to process–even within the same family.

Time Passages is an act of mourning. Director Kyle Henry, a former Austinite whose previous work has been funded through AFS’ grant programs, builds an assemblage out of his family’s archive to craft a narrative about his dying mother, but more than that, a narrative about his relationship with her, the complexities of his feelings about her struggle with dementia and eventual death following the death of his father in 2013.

The documentary’s premise describes what Henry does as “time travel,” as he weaves re-enactments with real archival material with real calls and voicemails between him and his mom. The evocation of time travel also plays to Elaine’s worsening memory as her dementia progresses: the movie opens on a series of voicemails she’s left him, growing increasingly confused about where she is and what is happening to her. It’s heartbreaking, particularly knowing that Henry and his siblings won’t even be able to visit her in person, but does not fall into melodrama. There’s a definite psychoanalytical edge throughout as Henry analyzes his relationship to his parents, and in the post-screening Q&A, he confirmed he’d been in psychoanalysis and had drawn from Jungian concepts for some sequences, notably a series of conversations where he speaks to himself roleplaying his mother, complete with a wig. This analytical eye works well to ground the pathos of the story–his re-enactment sequences (both be-wig’d and wooden-doll’d) give him a way to visually process his relationship and how he’s constructing the narrative of his mother’s life, while adding some needed levity to what is a very somber work overall. And honestly, that’s what mourning is really like. You find the funny things to hang on to as you work through the grief.

It’s a richly constructed scrapbook, weaving family photographs and VHS tapes, archival footage from Henry’s childhood, as well as footage Henry has taken of his own family over the years, images of objects and places his family has curated in their own scrapbooks. The core of the documentary spans the 2020 Covid lockdown, when Henry’s mother, Elaine, was placed in a long-term memory care facility. Henry’s relationship with his mother had always been set apart from the rest of his family; Henry is the youngest of 4 by a significant gap, so as his older siblings left the nest one by one, Henry remained as his mother’s companion. He tells a story: When he was born, his mother told his father, “This one’s mine.” 

The Covid lockdown meant that families could not visit their loved ones in care facilities like Elaine’s, and that distance is punctuated by recordings of the FaceTime calls between Henry and his mom, contrasted against re-enactments of his memories with her through the use of a wooden doll house replica of his childhood home. Little wooden peg versions of him and his family occupy the doll house; Henry voices conversations between him and his parents, him and his mom, as his little doll self develops crow’s feet and grey hairs at the temple. The film’s editors, Karen Skloss and Abbigail Vandersnick, are deft in stitching together each ephemeral piece. It comes together like, well, like flipping through a scrapbook, the way disparate fragments of a life coalesce into a life narrative. 

Skirting the edges of this narrative about his parents, and his mom, and his relationship with his mom is a broader interest in the political context of his family’s story. There’s an interesting throughline about Kodak, the company that ostensibly enabled his family to create and curate their archive–while enforcing ideas of what that archive should look like, what kinds of memories should be preserved. And then there’s Kodak’s business practices and their environmental impact, too. He uses Kodak and his political awakenings as a young adult as a wedge through his family’s archive, the moments he became aware of what felt like failures in his parents’ politics. To be fair, I’m also a White person who grew up (mostly) middle-class with much more strident politics than my parents had, and that reckoning is important and interesting to see on screen. That said, there’s a tension between these elements and the rest of the film that doesn’t fully resolve–at times it feels shot through with a kind of middle-class guilt, and a desire to atone for that guilt, which is not unsympathetic but did keep the film from fully clicking with me as it felt like those critical moments never fully integrated back into the untangling of his life narrative. 

Even so, Time Passages is meticulously crafted. Like a true scrapbook, it encourages viewers to draw their own meanings out of the fragments Henry juxtaposes; it also puts a spotlight on how families grapple with dementia and care, an issue that is certainly intimate to many yet not widely discussed. At the end of the screening, Henry and his collaborators called out Caring Across Generations, a national organization of disabled people, aging people, caregivers and care workers that seeks to change culture and policy toward care and caregiving in America. Though the story Time Passages shares is intimate, narrowed to Henry’s family, it opens the door for connections with other families and their stories: a reminder that even when we feel isolated in our grief, there are thousands and thousands of others around us navigating the same complexities. 

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