In The Nest, co-directors Julietta Singh and Chase Joynt unravel the history of the trailblazing women who previously lived in Singh’s family home over the course of more than a century. We posed our Qs à la mode to Julietta and Chase, and here’s what they shared!
If I had to describe our film using only three adjectives, they would be:
Julietta Singh: Enchanted, experimental, feminist.
Chase Joynt: Collaborative, interlocking, expansive.
I wanted to make this film because:
JS: I wanted to create something that moved well beyond the problematic mode of making work about other communities, or the insular mode of making work limited to our own communities. I wondered what it would look and feel like to create something deeply intra-communal, in collaboration with communities usually siloed from one and other, and to discover our shared histories of intimacy and struggle. My childhood home became the perfect site for this kind of experiment.
CJ: Julietta has such a rich and dynamic legacy of thinking on the page as a creative non-fiction writer and decolonial theorist. After learning of her family home and history, I knew with great clarity and conviction that it was time for her work to arrive on screen, as film offers such a different access point to conversations and communities.
The thing that surprised me most while making our film was:
JS: How absolutely game every participating community was to undertake this crazy project together from start to finish and beyond! Métis, Deaf and Japanese communities in Winnipeg gave so much of their time, imagination, history, art and heirloom objects to this wild cross-community collaboration. Their generosity in rediscovering our histories and forgotten matriarchs through a single home continues to feel like an incredible gift.
My favourite moment/scene/sequence in our film is:
CJ: There is a moment in the film where all of our collaborators arrive on screen together in a single take. We were running late on that day, so the scene was on the chopping block. Our First AD, Rosalee Yagihara, knew this scene was a critical part of Julietta’s vision and fought hard to keep it on the call sheet. We shot it in one take, weren’t even sure what we had, and moved on quickly as we were losing light. The scene truly makes the film in all the ways Julietta hoped and anticipated.
My most invaluable piece of doc-making equipment was/is:
JS: Honestly, Chase was my most invaluable piece of doc-making equipment! I blasted into The Nest as a total filmmaking novice, and I literally could not have done it without him! And as for Chase, that guy can’t live without an old-school clipboard on set!
Our must-have snack to get us through hours in the editing room is:
JS & CJ: Our super-talented editor and friend, Pauline Decroix, always brings back these delicious chocolates from her homeland in France that each have little inscriptions inside. Like Parisian fortune cookies with famous philosophical quotes. We ate a lot of those during the edit, and posted many of them on our bulletin board as mantras and aspirations!
One piece of documentary-filmmaking advice I’d like to share with aspiring documentarians is:
CJ: At the core, directing is about harnessing and communicating shared vision, not only with your participants and eventually your audience, but with your crew. Enabling and supporting those you are collaborating with to work expansively and creatively requires you to remain nimble and adjust to the needs, motivations and momentums of other people. The more often you can integrate visions and thus have people feel in control of their choices — rather than executing yours — the more cohesive your film, and perhaps more importantly the process of making your film, will feel.
Want to check out their film or just learn more about it?
Get the scoop, and your tickets, here!
