How many histories intersect within the space between four walls? Filmmaker Julietta Singh peels back layers of history in The Nest, her documentary directed with Chase Joynt (State of Firsts), now streaming at NFB.ca. The film, which premiered at Hot Docs last year, sees Singh take a closer look at the old cavernous house she grew up in as her mother gets ready to depart the Victorian mansion. She finally confronts the ghosts that live within the manor’s walls. Singh realises that they don’t necessarily haunt the place, but they inform the present with histories that intersect ongoing fights for representation and equity.
The film’s intersectional excavation of histories explores how the house was built by Métis feminist Annie Bannatyne, who whipped a white cartoonist in public. The house, dubbed “the nest” for being home to so many histories, also served as a boarding school for Deaf students where teacher Mary Ettie, who was Deaf herself, taught a curriculum that was way ahead of its time, while the manor later housed survivors of the Japanese internment camps before taking up years of Singh’s family history. The Nest considers these layers of history through a web of dramatized interpretations and traditional vérité woven together.
“In terms of the historical scenes that we shot, there was something really powerful about refusing scripting,” explains Singh in an interview with Alexander Mooney for POV. “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.”
Watch The Nest below from the NFB.
The Nest, Chase Joynt & Julietta Singh, provided by the National Film Board of Canada
