Chase Joynt & Julietta Singh | CANADA | 89 min | Captions
Co-presented by Guelph Museums
Feature Film Screening: At the end of her mother’s life, decolonial writer Julietta Singh returns to say goodbye to her haunted childhood home. As she digs into the history of the house, she uncovers 140 years of forgotten matriarchs and political rebels she never knew. This genre-defying cross-community collaboration that deftly interweaves Indigenous, Deaf, Japanese and South Asian histories, transforms a single home from a place of siloed stories into an archival site of radical potential.
Gracing its halls over time: a Métis revolutionary who founded the very hospital where Singh’s mother recuperates; a Deaf teacher who defied the ableist mandates of the era; the Japanese mother and daughter who lived there after wartime internment. And Singh’s own mother, a lifelong eco-feminist activist who raised mixed-race children.
Singh teams up with acclaimed filmmaker Chase Joynt (Framing Agnes) for a politically charged cross-community reckoning with memory, matriarchy and the enduring legacies of silenced voices, the film questions who gets lost in the archives of history, and what we stand to gain by resurrecting them.
DIRECTOR BIO:
Chase Joynt
Chase Joynt is a multi-award-winning director and writer. His documentary feature Framing Agnes was named one of the best movies of the year by The New Yorker and won more than 10 awards, including the Next Innovator Award and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed No Ordinary Man, which was presented at Cannes Docs as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress. Since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, No Ordinary Man has been hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and by Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” The film has won nine awards on the international festival circuit and was named to TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten.
Julietta Singh
Julietta Singh is an award-winning non-fiction writer and academic whose work engages the enduring effects of colonization through attention to ecology, inheritance and systemic inequalities. She is the author of three books: No Archive Will Restore You (2018), Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (2018) and, most recently, The Breaks (2021), a long letter to her daughter about race and mothering at the end of the world. The Nest is her first documentary feature.
