The Nest with Julietta Singh and Chase Joynt

Presented by Julietta Singh and Chase Joynt.

All are welcome to attend.

10:30 a.m. - Light refreshments
11:00 a.m. - public talk

Abstract:

In this talk, Chase Joynt and Julietta Singh explore the practice of collaboration, the complexities of archival research, and the work of fabulation through their feature-length experimental documentary, The Nest. The film centers on radical women, interracial alliances, and anticolonial pasts across 140 years of Canadian history told through the story of a single house in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The documentary, currently in post-production with the National Film Board of Canada, looks to architecture as a portal through which to tell unexpected and interconnected histories of Indigenous uprising, ecopolitical activism, disability rights, and the racialization of a nation. Working through the concepts of ‘decolonial intimacies,’ and ‘trans as method,’ the film displaces the dominant colonial narrative of the house and reframes Canadian history as an anticolonial story of interconnected and politically charged feminist and minoritized lives.

Speaker Bios:

Julietta Singh is a decolonial scholar and nonfiction writer whose work engages the enduring global effects of colonization through attention to ecology, inheritance, race, gender and sexuality. She works and teaches across the fields of decolonial studies, queer studies, the ecological humanities, experimental feminisms, and creative nonfictions. She is the author of three books: Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke UP, 2018), No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018), and The Breaks (Coffee House Press, 2021). 

Chase Joynt (Asper Fellow, 2024) is a director and writer whose films have won jury and audience awards internationally. His documentary feature, Framing Agnes, was named a Best Movie of the Year by The New Yorker after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award.  With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed No Ordinary Man, a feature-length documentary about jazz musician Billy Tipton, which was presented at Cannes Docs 2020 as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress. Since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2020, No Ordinary Man has been hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.”

Hosted by the FIMS Asper Fellowship.