In the final months of his mother Elaine’s late-stage dementia, as a pandemic rages across the globe, filmmaker Kyle Henry time travels via his family archive and his own memories to heal past wounds. Theirs is a large Texan family, but as one of Elaine's primary caregivers, the gay son shares a unique and complicated bond with his mother. Charting his mother’s early life and dashed desires through to years of motherhood and self-sacrifice, and tracing their relationship to its inevitable end, Time Passages playfully reckons with feelings of grief, conflict and loss of control. Beneath the Kodachrome smiles and grainy Super-8 home movies, Henry unearths difficult truths as an act of intergenerational healing that becomes a testament to love, legacy and those things that carry us through life’s most challenging times.
Over a decade ago, as the child of aging parents, director Kyle Henry began obsessively collecting the objects and images of his vast family archive. Time Passages culls material from over 10,000 family photos, over a thousand pages of documents, and hundreds of hours of home movies and taped interviews, then weaves them together with performative investigations in a black-box “theater of the mind,” stop-motion animation, location footage filmed across the USA, as well as the video diaries, Zoom and Facetime calls recorded during the months of Elaine’s final decline in 2020. Time Passages is a collage of film, video, audio, photographic, and digital materials that crisscross time and space. Filmed on location in California, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, Texas and upstate New York, the film considers additionally the crisis of eldercare affordability, and the toxic legacies of gender and racial discrimination, and environmental pollution, which is hidden within all our family archives.