Ever since she was a child, Julietta Singh could sense that her family was not alone in their old Victorian mansion in Winnipeg. It wasn’t until her aging mother Isadora took a life-altering fall down a flight of stairs that the decolonial writer and academic set about researching the house’s past residents. In this effort to connect her mother to something beyond her immediate health concerns, Singh unearthed several astonishing discoveries from the archive.
The house was built by Annie Bannatyne, a Métis feminist known for horsewhipping a white cartoonist in the town square. It later became a makeshift boarding school for Deaf students and also a workspace for Mary Ettie, a Deaf teacher who resisted ableist pedagogy. Later still, the home, which earned the nickname “the nest” for housing so many histories, was Winnipeg’s Japanese consulate post-WWII, home to a mother and daughter who weathered the internment camps.
Tucked away in the margins of a house’s history, these narratives are revived –– and frequently restaged –– by Singh and co-director Chase Joynt (No Ordinary Man, Framing Agnes). Their film The Nest weaves together these women’s stories with those of the present day, featuring Bannatyne’s great-great-granddaughter Tamara Macpherson Vukusic, Métis artist Katherena Vermette, Deaf actress Joanna Hawkins, Singh’s mother and daughter, and the director herself. The production was mounted in collaboration with the Manitoba Métis Federation, the Japanese Cultural Association of Manitoba, and the Manitoba School for the Deaf, with representatives from all of these groups appearing as themselves –– and occasionally as archival figures. Spectral and corporeal in equal measure, The Nest commingles histories, communities, voices, and techniques, eschewing and complicating established documentary forms at every turn.
POV spoke to Singh and Joynt via Zoom before The Nest’s premiere at Hot Docs.
POV: Alexander Mooney
JS: Julietta Singh
CJ: Chase Joynt
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
POV: How did the two of you come together to work on this project?
JS: Chase and I were longtime friends before we became collaborators. We both really admired and respected each other’s work, and I had watched him fairly closely across the making of his last film, Framing Agnes.
CJ: I’d been a longtime fan and reader of Julietta’s work, and we were walking around an urban path in the middle of the pandemic as Julietta was doing research and uncovering these extraordinary histories of her childhood home. I immediately understood the cinematic potential of what was unfolding. We just started “Yes, and”-ing each other and building from there. Early conversations with the NFB also afforded us the opportunity to think deeply and collaboratively about the potentials of a project, because I think in a different market, it would be a very hard project to pitch: we need a lot of time, we need a lot of money, we’re going to do it with a lot of people. But it was from there that we really began.
POV: Julietta, about how long did it take for all these uncanny connections in the house’s history to cohere for you in your research?
JS: I think once it started, it happened over [several] months, the discoveries of these legacies. But of course, I knew virtually nothing about all of these histories before that, so it was a pretty exceptional series of months. I was doing research mostly virtually because of the pandemic and the U.S./Canada border being closed, working a lot with archivists in Winnipeg and in Manitoba more broadly, getting things sent my way, and then, over the course of those months, starting to reach out to communities and community organizations that were linked to the house over time. [I was] sharing my archive and my findings with them, and they were sharing stuff back.
POV: How did the collaboration between the two of you translate to your duties and experiences on set?
CJ: I think the fact that we began our collaboration as friends was hugely informative because we already had a kind of shorthand, a way of thinking and speaking together. While this is Julietta’s first film, you would be hard pressed to know –– on set or otherwise –– based on her extraordinary orientations [toward] story, narrative, community building. It was really fluid. And yes, of course, I came with more practical filmmaking knowledge and on set experience, but I mean it sincerely when I say our experience [together] was unusual. We had to be building it together in real time because there was such a deep and critical investment in community collaboration and a kind of polyvocal approach to all the decisions we were making.
JS: I came to the collaboration with an obsessive concern with community vibe and wanting to make sure that everybody felt very supported and very included. [I was] obsessively tracking how we were moving in relation to all of the communities. Chase came with a lot of savvy and skill about the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. But one of the really amazing things that happened through our distinct expertise orientations was that we mind-melded. We really melded at the level of direction –– I don’t think there was a single decision that either one of us made that the other wouldn’t have made.
CJ: Agreed, agreed. [That] also allowed us to function separately. There are moments where we had to be in two different places, or someone was talking to someone while someone else was organizing something else, and there was a synergy to being able to return to each other and keep moving. That required very little clarification.
JS: But still, anything that fails about the film is going to be your fault.
CJ: I take full responsibility for all of the insufficiency.
POV: More on the direction; the film has a very polished style. There’s a lot of elaborate shots that move through the house, like the camera has a mind of its own. Can you speak a bit more about the process of filming this and how that might have differed from other documentaries you’ve seen or worked on?
CJ: You’re speaking directly to the extraordinary skill of our cinematographer, Chris Romeike, who comes to the screen with his own styles, orientations, investments. And one of the things we share as collaborators is a deep commitment to creating the conditions for folks –– be it on camera or utilizing a camera –– to work at their max capacity, to feel emboldened, to take risks and be creative. We knew that we wanted to invest in lensing, in light, in production design, such that they became the methods through which we could tell parts of the stories that we would never know otherwise. Instead of creating a script where people are saying things with their mouths, what does it mean to capture them moving through space? What does it mean to create a scene where a human body has as much to say as the walls and architecture of the house? Those entities are lit to become characters, comparable in style and priority. We came in with an understanding of what we wanted in those scenes, and also a willingness to really open up and let something on the day offer us something new.
JS: I think there’s two things embedded in your question. The first thing, about the roaming camera, was that we had a lot of conversations with our DP, Chris, about the container of the house –– how we would shoot a film that was contained within and around a single space without it feeling claustrophobic. Every scene of every part of the film is all in or immediately around the house, which was a crazy experience. But [with] the roving, the lens becomes another spiritual or ghostly presence in the house.
But I also want to answer the question of “polished,” because it’s something that we thought a lot about. It’s something that, in talks that I’ve given about the film where people are looking at stills, they’re like, “You’re representing all of this messy and difficult history, in a really beautiful and cinematic style, and what is the reason for that?” For me, the reason is that when we’re exploring minoritized histories and when we’re exploring feminist histories of subjugation, there’s something politically fertile about representing beautifully those incredibly, intensely hard things that have been forgotten. The visual beauty of the film, for me, is a refusal of the subjugation and burial of our histories.
POV: There’s quite a lot of reenactment in the film, but not in the traditional sense. It seems like there’s a conscious effort to create ruptures in the illusions these scenes normally try to maintain. Can you speak a bit about your approach to what constitutes reality in the film?
CJ: I think the word “reenactment” requires some attention, because one of the things we were thinking about is that it’s actually not reenactment. We started calling it “re-embodiment” as a way to try to capture something that extends beyond a citational practice to history. “Reenactment” is limited, because it imagines that we know. So there’s something very useful about, at least for us as a shorthand, thinking about re-embodiment as a way to capture affect and other things. The question of reality is one that’s energizing to us; we think deeply about academics like Saidiya Hartman and concepts like critical fabulation as a way to think toward histories that are unknown, particularly minoritized histories, and also as it relates to early feminist experimental filmmaking. We are always reenacting or re-embodying on camera in some very important way. We want to refuse the requirement of certain kinds of documentary films to treat history in ways that reduce and render these people more legible than they could ever possibly be.
JS: In terms of the historical scenes that we shot, there was something really powerful about refusing scripting. We didn’t write any dialogue, and any dialogue that occurs on screen in those historical moments is entirely improvised by the actors. In the cases of the Japanese and Deaf histories, to this day we have very little idea what they’re saying, so we didn’t translate those, either. That’s part of the ethics and ethos of letting communities claim their own histories. In terms of reality, I think we’re less concerned with that than we are with intimacy and connection and how those modes can operate together. The “reality” is that all of these communities and all of these women have a relationship historically to the land and to the house, and that’s as much reality as we need.
POV: To push this further, there’s a moment where the difference between a photographic portrait and a painted version is politicized –– when Tamara points out that the latter was someone’s artistic interpretation of her ancestor, presumably done by a white man. Were these notions of truth and interpretation on your mind when those re-embodiments were being staged? If so, how did they inform what we see on screen?
CJ: The scene that you’re discussing is one of our favourites to talk about, precisely because it’s an example of our directorial intention to invite a container, which is to say, “Hey, Métis collaborators, we have this extraordinary wardrobe person who is able to think across various styles of dress, we’re going to put you in a place where we understand bodies have been historically, and we’re going to ask you to talk to each other in real time, in the contemporary moment, about whatever you want to say.” Those were some major prompts for that scene, [where we] introduce this object, this extraordinary painting of this person, who was here and is here with us in some embodied, affective, ghostly, haunting. The relationship between photographs and painting is one that is being routed through the interests of those at the table. We did not care to introduce the photo. We didn’t actually even care to have the conversation, necessarily. But because of Ciara’s investments in Métis iconographic history and portraiture, and Tamara’s ability to bring that painting into the house, and Katharina Vermette’s striking visual resemblance to Annie sitting at that table, the combination of all of those forces produce this moment of interpretation that is really being driven by the interests of the collaborators.
POV: We see a contrast between the ways that the Deaf community used the apparatuses of film and print media to preserve their right to communication and voice while the Métis and Japanese women have a bit of a thornier relationship to these art forms in the histories we encounter. What might these archival artworks tell us about the politics of representation in the present tense?
CJ: One of the exciting things for us was the recognition that the house was a site of activist-mediated potential, in particular as it relates to the Deaf history. What does a printing pass, or a mechanism through which a community connects, offer us? Not only in thinking about what happened in that house, but all of the legacies of Deaf organizing that extend beyond it. The fascination for us was less the literalized words on those pages than the ways in which the Deaf students in particular were mobilizing their own experiences for external circulation.
There were small snapshots of Deaf life and Deaf experience in the archive that Julietta was finding that gave us these tiny wormholes of perspective to what life might have been like on the property at that time, and those were the sparks that allowed us to expand the creative possibilities of our scene-building. The Métis community right now is in a moment of extraordinary reckoning and consideration with their own politics of representation, which are not Julietta and mine to fully translate or articulate, but it’s an opportunity for us to use the film as a stage or portal through which some of these conversations can emerge.
JS: Their printing press was something that we discovered by seeing the date of the first publication of The Silent Echo corresponding with that of the school fire. So it was by going back to the first issue that we were like, “Holy shit, this happened the same year that they were [at the nest]” [and then] working with this fact and then finding a super orientalist newspaper article about “dainty little Asian ladies” from a super white, though really fascinating perspective –– someone we didn’t [end up including] in the film. Thinking through the importance of challenging the formal colonial statist archive and of communities reclaiming their own stories, that question of politics of representation is about sharing resources and sharing troubling depictions and discovering crazy coincidences and then seeing how we can unfurl from there.
The tea ceremony is amazing because we have this archival version that doesn’t tell us much, but for the process of staging the tea ceremony, we got the contemporary tea ceremony group to perform it. What went into shooting that scene was an incredible amount of education for me and Chase, learning from tea ceremony specialists and thinking carefully about what objects would be there, understanding the rhythms of the tea ceremony, so that we were representing it properly.
CJ: It’s such a great example of when the filmmaking had to yield to the collaboration in very important ways. We were in the beautiful backyard, but of course, a backyard is not created equally as it relates to sunshine, and there are places in that backyard that are much more beautiful than others. Our cinematographer was like, “This is the place in the backyard to do it,” and our tea cremony collaborators were like, “We would never face that direction.” It was this amazing moment of consideration where, without hesitation, the collaborators win.
POV: Julietta, the scene where your mother discusses the balancing act between activism and motherhood creates a very clear parallel with your own daughter’s involvement in the film. Was the making of this a kind of learning experience for her in some ways? Was there any material that you wanted to shield her from?
JS: There was no material that I wanted to shield her from. And definitely, it was a learning experience. Chase and I expressly invited my daughter into the process by way of creating her own micro-documentary. The whole time that we were shooting, Issa was running around learning Super 8 technology and getting mentored in various ways through Chase and other film people on how to document and how to create. She was on a journey of our own, like digging up the backyard in search of hidden treasure. For her, the process was equally about discovery, but discovery from the vantage point of a 10-year-old who was really looking for other things, right? And at the same time she was, of course, learning everything that we were learning and being steeped in those emerging narratives as well, and learning how to collaborate as well.
In a lot of ways, the film and my daughter’s involvement in it are an extension from the last book I wrote [The Breaks], which is a long letter to my daughter about race and mothering at the end of the world. It’s a book that takes seriously queer mothering and queer parenting and what it means to raise a mixed race kid in a world that is often very polarized, especially in the United States, between discourses of Black and white. The nuances of home in that book and queer homemaking and queer family-making extend. Even though the film is not in any way expressly about queer history or queer identity, its vantage points are inherently queer and its approaches are inherently queer. The journey that Issa went on, on screen and off in the film, is about reconsidering fundamentally how we belong to home and what it means to be at home.
POV: How did it feel watching the actors embody the roles of the ghosts you’d always sensed in the house as a child?
JS: Honestly, it was incredible. I say some version of this in the film, but for me, the process of making the film –– around re-situating myself in relation to home and reinterpreting that space, no longer as a space of, like, our own individual, siloed history, but part of a much greater and more integrated political, cultural, historical set of narratives –– was really like an absolute recreation of the space for me. I’ll never think about it the same again. Where I used to go into rooms and have a very particular haunting memory of my own youth, I now experience [them] absolutely differently. It truly and deeply, in the most microbial recesses of my body, changed how I think and feel about that space.
