Time Passages (2025)- A personal Documentary Unpacking Things Left Unsaid Before Time Runs Out
I remember as a kid growing up, my dad had purchased a camcorder for all those special occasions. Of course, everyone just uses their phones now, but I had a bulky camcorder that took a full VHS tape in the side of it. No mini-cassettes, and this was before digital was ever a thing. I have no idea what happened to all the recordings of me as a child, or my family. As a blind person, those videos now seem more precious because they offer audio, whereas pictures do not. I have photo albums for days, but I only have memories of the images in them. Keeping a record of your history is so important, but becomes more so when you reach a point that you would like to revisit parts of your past that the memories are missing some gaps.
For Kyle Henry, who explores his family in the new documentary Time Passages, he found his family archive, and pulls conversations from home videos from years ago as he seeks answers to some of the things left unsaid. Now, Kyle lives as an adult, whose father already passed, and whose mother suffers from dementia and is in a full time memory care facility. This is also during covid, where access is limited, and the only calls he has are zoom. time is running out, and Kyle has questions.
It is a personal documentary, and a lot of film is reflective and personal anyway, but not always so directly revealing of yourself and your family. I appreciated the time Kyle took to piece together his family history, especially as the clock seems to be winding down. He’s blocked into a few choices that I didn’t quite agree with, including the decision to have a conversation with himself, as if the other half of him was what his mother would say. I think it can be cathartic, but the realization is always that we never really know, and sometimes people surprise us. A filmmaker tried a similar thing recently by imagining what Alfred Hitchcock would say about his films, and then called it a documentary. There’s nothing non-fiction about that though, as it is all made up. Even the most astute scholar will never have the exact words.
I don’t chase the same answers that Kyle is, so there’s some disassociation there. there’s such a personal life story on display, that the resonance grows with how closely one associates and can see themselves in the narrative. For me, I felt chunks of it, so I appreciated it as a film, but I think Kyle might have even more up his sleeve as he continues to explore his own filmmaking career. There’s something he mentions in the film about having a good enough job to afford healthcare, specifically a therapist, and being a struggling documentarian isn’t likely to afford him that.
The film was presented to me without audio description, which doesn’t surprise me. It does put up a barrier as a blind film critic that I can’t recommend it to those like me, as we don’t have any of the visual elements relayed to us. But, for sighted readers, if you like documentaries, and specifically love the ones where the filmmaker seemingly turns the lens on themselves, then you should find something in Time Passages. For more, check out the video. I review films even when sick.
