A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory

While travel was severely restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the US filmmaker Meg Walsh was unable to visit their father, who was experiencing worsening memory loss. By the Time I Reach Him is shaped by this moment of physical and emotional distance between the two. Featuring audio recorded from a phone call in which Walsh’s father forgot who they were for the first time, Walsh sets the disjointed conversation to contemporary footage, archival imagery and sporadic blank screens – all of it threaded together in black and white. Through this spare and affecting construction, Walsh evokes both sides of the experience: the often confusing, fragmented and erratic experience of losing one’s memory, and the feeling of seeing a loved one drift between the present and places unknowable. For a different take on the nature of memory, identity and selfhood in those living with dementia, read this essay.