Christopher Henze tells stories about people—and the systems they find themselves inside.
His work spans documentary film, fiction, and narrative screenwriting, with a recurring interest in what happens when ordinary people begin asking questions nobody particularly wants answered.
He has made two feature documentaries about women’s bodies, which he knows is an unusual career choice for a man. Both films started at home.
40 Weeks followed women and their families through pregnancy, letting them describe the experience in their own words. Wise Women — Humanity’s Untold Origins began when his wife and creative partner, Dominique Debroux, entered perimenopause, was told it was the beginning of the end, and said that explanation made no sense to her.
Henze went looking for a better one. He thought it might take a few months. Nine years and nearly thirty anthropologists later, he had a hypothesis about human evolution he had not set out to have.
He was also a co-producer of Planet of the Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs and executive produced by Michael Moore. Across his documentaries, his work tends to be suspicious of institutions without being especially interested in villains. The problem is often that perfectly reasonable people keep doing what they have been trained to do, inside systems nobody thinks to question.
That concern carries into his fiction. His political conspiracy thriller, Split Allegiance, follows a woman carrying dangerous information and the man assigned to contain it—two people kept apart by a system neither can fully see. His feature screenplay in development, People are People, explores a society’s demand for a savior and its destruction of the man who refuses to become one.
His directing work also includes television commercials and music videos. He is developing Music Matters, a documentary series with producer Jonathan Sanger.
He lives in New Jersey with Dominique and their daughter Gaia, and rides most mornings. He is not an anthropologist. This has been pointed out to him.
