Kyle Henry, a filmmaker and associate professor in the School of Communication’s Department of Radio/Television/Film, documents his journey of grief and healing in his new film “Time Passages,” which is making its Midwest debut in the Chicago International Film Festival. Above, a still from the film. Photo courtesy Kyle Henry
Watching a loved one battle dementia is a unique kind of grief. Witnessing the personality of someone you once knew and loved unravel in slow motion forces loved ones to live in a state of sustained and prolonged sorrow.
For Kyle Henry, that process was compounded by a desire to resolve a fraught relationship with his mother — during a global pandemic no less — while also trying to recover family memories and create new ones before it was too late.
Henry, a filmmaker and associate professor in the School of Communication’s Department of Radio/Television/Film, documents his journey of grief and healing in a new non-fiction feature film “Time Passages,” which is making its Midwest debut in the Chicago International Film Festival on Saturday, Oct. 26 at the Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark St.
“Time Passages” chronicles the deeply emotional final months of Henry’s journey as he cares for his mother, Elaine, during the heart-wrenching late stages of her dementia. Henry’s family archive was extensive — he combed through more than 10,000 photos, over a thousand pages of documents, and hundreds of hours of home movies and taped interviews.
Kyle Henry visiting his mother, Elaine Henry. “Time Passages” chronicles the deeply emotional final months of Henry’s journey as he cares for his mother, Elaine, during the heart-wrenching late stages of her dementia. Photo courtesy Kyle Henry
But it was the COVID-19 pandemic that Henry says proved to be the most emotionally challenging.
“I turned the camera on the two of us as we were separated like so many other families, recording the last five months of her life in those tumultuous first days of the pandemic,” Henry said. “I didn’t realize the crisis and the transformative narrative I would end up documenting would be my own.”
Henry says his film is his attempt to understand what happened, not only during the pandemic, but over the course of his life.
“I asked for mom’s blessing [to produce the film] in real life but also in a spiritual way two years ago when I was writing the film’s narration to help me speak for her.”
Henry takes an innovative performance approach to telling his life story and the relationship with his mother. He uses stop-motion animation with toy figurines to reenact family dramas. Henry even pretends to be his mother on camera by wearing a wig and stages a conversation between them. Many scenes were shot on the Evanston campus, including Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts, John J. Louis Hall and the Technological Institute. Through the Provost’s office Undergraduate Research Assistant Program, Henry hired nearly a dozen undergraduates to work on the film in various roles from editors to archivists, to publicists. Several Documentary Media MFA graduate students are also collaborators.
“This film would not exist without Northwestern’s support, and I’m especially filled with gratitude due to the very personal nature of the film, that deals with the challenges many of us faced surrounding caregiving, the grief process and memorialization that are imbedded in the work,” Henry said.
