TIME PASSAGES (2024) with filmmaker Kyle Henry

A pandemic rages across the globe. In the final months of his mother Elaine’s late-stage dementia, gay filmmaker Kyle Henry (Associate Professor, Radio/TV/Film) 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, 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.

TIME PASSAGES (Kyle Henry, 2024, 86 min, DCP)
A reception will be held in the Block Museum lobby at 6 PM sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.
Following the screening, Ines Sommer (Director of the Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab) will moderate a discussion with filmmaker Kyle Henry, and guests Ai-jen Poo (President, National Domestic Workers Alliance & Executive Director, Caring Across Generations) + Northwestern Professor of Psychology Dan McAdams.

Co-presented with support from the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab (PPSL) for the Promotion of Mental Health via Cinematic Arts, the MFA in Documentary Media, and the Radio/TV/Film Department of Northwestern University

About the Filmmaker:

Kyle Henry is an independent fiction and documentary director focusing on individuals and communities transformed by crisis. He also has a concurrent expertise in film editing. His feature fiction directing debut ROOM premiered at both the Sundance and Cannes film festivals and was nominated for two Film Independent Spirit Awards. His feature documentary UNIVERSITY INC., about the corporatization of higher education, and AMERICAN COWBOY, about a gay rodeo champ, received wide festival play after SXSW festival premieres, with the former touring colleges and universities throughout North America as part of The McCollege Tour, supported in part by filmmakers Michael Moore and Richard Linklater. His short film FOURPLAY: TAMPA premiered at Cannes Directors' Fortnight and Sundance. His FOURPLAY feature anthology premiered at Frameline, then toured internationally to over thirty engagements, receiving US distribution via TLA Releasing. His partially devised fiction feature ROGERS PARK, premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival, then toured theatrically throughout North America, garnering a New York Times Critics' Pick as well as a 100% Fresh rating on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. His most recent non-fiction feature TIME PASSAGES premiered at the Cinequest Int'l Film Festival and will tour theatrical, academic, and community screenings, followed by educational release via New Day Films in Spring 2025.

Henry is also the editor of the Sundance/Tribeca/SXSW award-winning feature fiction narrative Manito and ten documentary features including AUDIENCE OF ONE, LIGHT FROM THE EAST, the PBS/ITVS-funded TROOP 1500 and LETTERS FROM THE OTHER SIDE, and Showtime's TRINIDAD. He edited the Emmy Award-winning WHERE THE SOLDIERS COME FROM for which he was also a Sundance Institute Documentary Edit and Story Lab Fellow. He has given guest talks at many institutions about the art and practice of editing.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, United States