Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Over the summer, o we're bringing you some of the highlights of our 2025-26 season, which wrapped up in mid-May.
Speaker: We're going to be back with our brand new fall season in September. Our first live radio broadcast will be on September 19th on Vancouver Cooperative Radio CFRO 100.5 FM and streaming live at coopradio.org slash redeye.
Speaker: Podcasts of interviews from that show will be posted the following week. On the podcast today, I talk with Julietta Singh and Chase Joint about their new documentary, The Nest.
Speaker: At the end of her mother's life, writer and academic Julieta Singh returns to Winnipeg to say goodbye to her childhood home. As she digs into the history of the house, she uncovers 140 years of forgotten matriarchs and political rebels she never knew.
Speaker: Singh has teamed up with acclaimed filmmaker Chase Joint to create a documentary that interweaves indigenous, deaf, Japanese, and South Asian histories, all connected through the house that she grew up in.
Speaker: Chase Joint and Julieta Singh join me today to talk about The Nest, the film that they co-directed. Hello, Julieta. Hello. And hello, Chase.
Speaker: Hello. What started you on this journey back through the history of your childhood home, Julieta? You know, i was doing some research around my childhood home in the early months of the pandemic because my mom and I were separated by the u s border and I couldn't go home to visit her. And she was wrestling with the end of her life in a home that she'd lived in for nearly 45 years.
Speaker: And so I thought it would be an interesting little research project as a kind of gift to my mom to discover a little bit about the other girls and women who had lived in the house over 140 years of its existence.
Speaker: And as I was researching, I couldn't have imagined the extraordinary diversity of histories that were wrapped up there. And so it began as a kind of loving gesture to my mom, ended up turning into a rather explosive feature film project. that the house was home to some extraordinary people, including your mother. Who were some of the people you started to find out about in your research?
Speaker: Well, the history that I had grown up with, the history that I knew was that it had belonged for about 50 years, the first half of the 1900s, to a colonial banker. And so, like most of Canada's history, what I knew was a history of colonial encounter.
Speaker: and colonial narratives about capitalism and patriarchy. And what I found were a series of women who I had never known had been there growing up, including the legendary, formidable Annie Banatyne, who many Canadians now know as the Métis renegade who once horse whipped a white man in the streets of the Red River settlement in what's now Winnipeg for disparaging Indigenous women.
Speaker: And so Annie was the kind of explosive beginning. And from there, I learned that for a short time at the end of the it had served as a boarding school for the Manitoba School for the Deaf.
Speaker: And the first deaf teacher in Western Canada, a deaf woman named Mary Eddie McDermott had lived there. And so I started to kind of weave these very diverse histories into the story of my mum, who, as you mentioned, is also one of the kind of legendary matriarchs of the home and who, in fact, has lived there for longer than anyone else across the house's time now.
Speaker: So it ended up being kind of project of trying to look at these very different women across time and across history and to figure out where their stories coalesced. And at what point did you join the project, Chase?
Speaker: I was a part of these early conversations as Julietta and I were walking around urban paths in the middle of the pandemic. And one of the things that i recognized immediately was the potential for hybrid form.
Speaker: Much of my documentary work is trying to think about performance as a mechanism for social change and collaboration as an enduring method of art making. When we began exploring and imagining the potential of a huge cross-community collaboration, I could feel in my body the cinematic potential of all of these ideas.
Speaker: You've said that you're suspicious about documentary as a genre. Tell me more about that. The history of documentary is so often a history of outsider portraits of folks, communities, places that the maker knows very little about.
Speaker: And as a result, the form can feel evacuatory and consumptive of difference. And so one of the things that Julieta and I are committed to in our individual practices and in our collaborative practice is to try to think differently about authorship and to try to push back against a form to create something new. And my suspicion about and within documentary remains and The Nest exists as you know one of my favorite examples ah of trying to move otherwise.
Speaker: So then when you're thinking about a documentary, we're looking at other people from us, from the outside. Is is that the idea? Absolutely. It's a mechanism for curiosity and a way in which, in some ways, I think directors, authors, storytellers try to wield control over the narratives and histories of others. And I think we have an opportunity to to think differently about what the camera can do.
Speaker: Julietta, how did you go about bringing in people in the communities whose histories were connected to your childhood home that you were discovering? Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, in some ways, in an obvious way, of course, I brought them in. But ah in ah in another way, I think it was really a process of mutual letting in. So I did what any good researcher would do. And I picked up the phone and I called myself.
Speaker: organizations, the Manitoba Metis Federation, the Japanese Cultural Association of Manitoba, the Manitoba School for the Deaf, all organizations connected through my childhood home. And I just cold called people and said, hey, this is who I am. this is where I live. I grew up in Winnipeg. And we have this kind of odd connection through the history of my mom's house. And it opened the doors to so many people, so many communities, so many extraordinary artists and writers and journalists and makers of all kinds that each community sort of jumped right in and said, we want to participate in this strange thing you're doing.
Speaker: I wouldn't say without hesitancy, but I would say that there was a lot of trust building with each of the communities very early on. And each one sort of came to the table and shared archives with me. i shared my findings, they shared their holdings, and it became this...
Speaker: explosive feminist project of reclaiming histories and reclaiming women from the past about whom too little is known. And so our task together was to think about how to animate these women on screen, how to not tell their stories or script narratives for them, but rather to just re-embody them in the house, almost in a kind of not haunted ghostly way, but in a kind of summoning way.
Speaker: And so it was a really incredible journey between those organizations and members of those organizations or individuals tied to those communities that I think really, in many ways, changed my life and in particular changed how I feel about the home and how I understand now my my own place there.
Speaker: The film includes imagined scenes with some of the women who lived in the house, but they definitely aren't by any stretch of the imagination standard reenactments.
Speaker: How did you go about creating those scenes? but Yeah, there's a variety of different methods that we employed to think toward what Julietta and I now refer to as re-embodiments. You know, when we think about, and it's related to your question about the history of documentary, when we think about reenactment, it's often an aesthetic exploration of a kind of assumed truth of a past, that we are reenacting something that we are being told happened. And we
Speaker: in reality, don't know a lot of what happened. And we certainly don't know what happened within the walls of those of that home and of those rooms. And so we thought about this as a way to enable conditions of possibility for and with our collaborators to think alongside the historical subjects. So as an example, when we were collaborating with Joanna Hawkins, who plays the first deaf teacher in Western Canada, Mary Eddy McDermott.
Speaker: Joanna came to our collaboration already with a kind of embodied feeling tone of what it might have felt like to have been Mary Eddy. Joanna is also a teacher and a mime actor. And so the blurred boundaries between Mary and Joanna become very productive in that scene. And so what you feel on screen is both Mary and Joanna together.
Speaker: And there were many times where Julietta and I had ideas and we were told that that was not right or that that needed to be adjusted. And we really appreciated that. We were you know collaborating with folks from the Japanese Cultural Association of Manitoba, and we were able to bring in some of the original objects that were in the home during the era wherein the house was the Japanese consulate. And we staged a gorgeous kimono, which exists in the film, as you've seen. And we spent half a day figuring out where that kimono should be set in the house because we would set it down and our collaborators would look back and say, there's just no way that kimono would have been there. And it was wonderful because we had to keep adjusting the shoot schedule to really feature this object in all of its precision. And it's true of the objects and also true of the performances.
Speaker: There's a scene towards the end of the film where a group of Métis women in period dress sit around a dining room table, and they're talking about everything from their own lived experiences, Métis women, the women themselves, not the historical figures, and things that happen to the characters that they're portraying. How did that come about?
Speaker: Yeah, thanks for asking about that scene, which I think in some ways is the most... complicated and layered of the film because essentially what we did was we said to four of our extraordinary Métis collaborators who had worked really closely with me across many years to realize the depiction of Annie Banatyne, we invited them all to dress in period pieces. Costume design was its own kind of epic and really interesting process.
Speaker: But we basically invited them to come and hang out with each other. And they sat around my dining room table with a gorgeous portrait of Annie Banatyne, original portrait of Annie Banatyne hanging in the background. And Chase and I cleared the room.
Speaker: There was nobody in the room with them but our cinematographer, the very talented Chris Roemike and a boom operator. And we left the space and just let the camera roll for, I think, over an hour.
Speaker: It was substantial. And we just said, talk about whatever you want to talk about. And one of the amazing things that happened was they began by naming their matriarchal ancestors and sharing a little bit about who they each were and their experiences. And then all of a sudden, one of them burst into this very strange, historical, sudden, spontaneous recreation of a women's organizing scene at the table from the 1800s. And all of them just rolled with it.
Speaker: And there's a moment when they break character, they realize that they've said something wrong, or it wasn't historically accurate, and everybody starts laughing. But none of it was prescribed, and all of it was quite spontaneous. And Chase and I were sitting at the monitors a room away with our jaws just dropped to the ground, kind of not believing what we were witnessing. But I think for us, it was the kind of magic of this approach that we were taking, which is, you really don't know what will happen when you invite people to claim their histories in those ways.
Speaker: Well, staying on the theme of magic, the house itself is very much a presence in the film. It's not just a stage set for the characters or whatever's happening there. So what kind of magic did you work, Chase, to make that happen?
Speaker: but Well, I don't know if I can use any I statements in this answer, but I will say that the house is quite extraordinary without cameras and the opportunity to lens those walls and think about door frames and the windows as thresholds and portals to different histories and different perspectives was so exciting. And this is where we were collaborating with our cinematographer, but also with our set designers and our costume designers and with quite literally everyone who had eyes on the place had ideas and and inspirations. And so how could we quite literally let the house speak? How could we use the materials that we were amidst as motivators for the story? And so that's where you see great attention to details like the staircases as
Speaker: as not only structures that allow our subjects to move up and down and around, but allow audiences to to go on a different kind of a journey.
Speaker: Well, it really is a journey. I mean, we never really know where we are in the house. It becomes kind of like a mysterious landscape for all the stories. It's really quite remarkable.
Speaker: I love the mysterious landscape. I'll take that as a great compliment. What did your mother think about the film and what you uncovered about the history of the house? You know, I think the film is complicated in some ways for her because it's a parting of ways to a space that she's been very committed to. And I've often said long before making the film, I'd often said that there was a kind of collapsing of the difference between my mother and the home over the almost half century that she's lived there. And she spent so much of her life
Speaker: passionately devoted to its restoration and its historical preservation and having the house historically designated and just working kind of tirelessly in it and she ran it as a bed and breakfast for many decades. And so, you know, now in her later 80s, facing the end of her time there,
Speaker: I think, you know, that the saying goodbye to the house is in some ways a real reckoning with the end of her life, which i think is not easy for for many people.
Speaker: But i I hope that she sees in it what I see in it, which is that she's become part of a legacy that's much greater than her own individual history or our family history into a kind of network of political and activist belonging across time that really interweaves so many of Canada's minoritized and underwritten histories.
Speaker: Well, it's a ah wonderful film and I want to thank you both so much for joining me today. Thank you. It's such a pleasure. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. I've been speaking with Julietta Singh and Chase Joint, co-directors of the new NFB documentary, The Nest. The NFB are teaming up with UBC and Doc Northwest to present an evening with Julietta Singh this coming Wednesday, November 5th, at the Chan Center.
Speaker: It's called Beyond Siloed Stories, and it's a free event that includes a screening of The Nest, followed by a talk by Julietta Singh. And the event is free. You can reserve tickets at chancenter.com.
Speaker: You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be great if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people to find us.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
