TUESDAY AUGUST 22
8:00 PM THEATER ONE
LAST THOUGHTS
Kevin Henry
Documentary Video 72:00 2006 Midwest Premiere
In 1926, 16-year old Robert Henry hopped his first train, bound from
Oklahoma to California. What started as curiosity soon became economic
necessity, as Rob joined the thousands of young men and women roaming
the American West in desperate search for opportunity. For the rest of his
life he kept those experiences to himself, and it was only on the eve of his
death, in 1992, that he first related them to his son, who
tape-recorded them for posterity.
Seventy-five years after that first train ride his grandson, armed with
that tape and a 16mm camera, would spend a year retracing his grandfather¹s
travels, from the plains of Oklahoma to the mountains of Washington to
the deserts of southern California, looking for echoes of the past in the
modern landscape.
The result is a film about traveling, about hardship and loneliness,
but also about the way the simplest acts of kindness can reverberate
through an entire life. Like its source material, it is a fragmented journey,
leaving us with snapshots of life experience, as it was then and as it is now.
