Kyle Henry brings Rice Cinema to the world stage

By Arman Saxena     11/19/24 11:00pm

Cannes, Sundance and South by Southwest. What do they have in common? They’re all world-renowned film festivals that have exhibited the works of alumnus Kyle Henry ’94. 

Henry returned to Houston this year for the Houston Cinema Arts Festival where he screened his latest work “Time Passages,” a multimedia film chronicling Henry’s excavation of his family history while his mother battled health issues during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“Time Passages” was also selected by the Chicago International Film Festival this year — another accolade for Henry who received a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination and a Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight selection for his 2005 feature “Room.”

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Henry entered Rice as an aspiring pre-med student and said he didn’t initially see filmmaking in his future. 

“I came into Rice expecting to be a biology major,” Henry said. “I took all the AP classes, and I quickly discovered — I think within my first semester — that that was not what I was interested in.” 

Instead, it was history, sociology and film that captivated him. 

The other major influence? The Rice Cinema. 

The theater became a portal to new worlds, an experience that profoundly shaped his perspective, he said. 

“In particular, I felt that watching films from all over the world at Rice Cinema opened up the world to me and also gave me a sense of humanity being really interconnected,” Henry said. “When you watch films from all over the world, you really get that full, deeper range of what humanity means writ large, and I wanted to live as fully as I possibly could. I thought I could do that by observing other people with my camera.”

Henry’s early influences at Rice included Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Lindsay Anderson’s “If…,” and John Frankenheimer’s “Seconds,” along with documentaries like “Harlan County, USA” and “Hearts and Minds.” He also drew inspiration from professor Brian Huberman, who helped Henry understand and later subvert the Western genre in his 1998 documentary “American Cowboy.” 

“I used some of the framing, some of the composition somebody like a classical Western filmmaker like John Ford would use to film this cowboy,” Henry said. “The only difference was this cowboy was gay … in some ways, Brian gave me the tools to subvert the Western genre by first helping me really understand what the Western genre did.”

These films helped solidify Henry’s passion for storytelling, especially his career-long interest in telling stories about marginalized people and communities.

“There was also a traveling show of films from NewFest in New York that was LGBTQ films, and it was the first time that that showcase traveled,” Henry said. “There was no LGBTQ film festival here in Houston, and those films coming here and being shown on Rice campus were really radical in the early ’90s. That opened up a whole world for me as a gay man, realizing that there were people like me all over the world too.” 

Henry’s first foray into filmmaking came through Rice classes, particularly those taught by Huberman, who is still teaching at Rice today. 

 “There were so few film students, I think I was one of five or six,” Henry said. “It was kind of like you run the place, you had the key, you could get in any time. So many times I was there at the Rice Media Center until 2, 3, 4 in the morning, working on my films.”

Henry credits this freedom for fostering his work. 

“The freedom that I had here gave me a tenacity and perseverance, and maybe my work is idiosyncratic because I go about it my way and not an institutional way,” Henry said.

Beyond the classroom, Henry, a Baker College graduate, found inspiration in Rice’s extracurricular theater scene. He wrote plays, produced readers’ theater, and participated in productions with the Rice Players and Baker Shakespeare. 

“The freedom you have at Rice to kind of do anything — find money, be able to put on a show, and do it all extracurricular — gave me a ton of freedom,” Henry said. “Beyond the classes, which were incredible, it was the freedom to create these co-curricular projects that was really instrumental in giving me my tenacity and DIY spirit.” 

For Henry, storytelling remains about transformation — observing people going through crises, changes, and growth. 

“Is it worth watching? To me, human beings going through crises, going through transformation, are still really important for us, as other human beings, to watch,” Henry said. 

Henry’s journey from biology hopeful to acclaimed filmmaker may have been unexpected, but it was forged through a willingness to explore, take risks, and tell the stories that spoke to him. 

“I will continue to make work until I no longer can that continues to feel personal and I feel can transform me,” Henry said. “I hope that anyone who makes art approaches it for that reason because no audience, no critic, no rejection can then stop you from making your work, because then you know you’re making it mostly for yourself.”

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