Screening: The Nest
A documentary by Chase Joynt and Julietta Singh
Sunday, October 25, 2026 | 4:15 PM 鈥� 5:45 PM | FREE
Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema
麻豆视频School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
While growing up in an old Victorian mansion, Julietta Singh was certain her house was haunted. Mysterious footsteps, slamming doors, sudden gusts of wind all combined to give her childhood a gothic feel.
After her octogenarian mother falls down the stairs and is left disabled, Singh, now a decolonial scholar and writer, returns home to bid it farewell. Sensing her mother becoming one of the house鈥檚 ghosts, she sets out to find its other matriarchs, the spectres of her youth that she felt across time. What she discovers is an extraordinary archive of forgotten renegades and quiet rebels, hidden histories and silenced voices. All intimately connected over 140 years by the house.
Gracing its halls over time: a M茅tis revolutionary who founded the very hospital where Singh鈥檚 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鈥檚 own mother, a lifelong eco-feminist activist who raised mixed-race children.
In this deftly woven feature-length documentary, Singh teams up with acclaimed filmmaker Chase Joynt (Framing Agnes, No Ordinary Man) to co-direct a genre-defying cross-community portrait that challenges the settler colonial stories of belonging we鈥檝e been taught. Common threads and uncanny coincidences emerge between the residents of 鈥渢he nest鈥� who鈥檝e been forgotten, the women Singh comes to call her 鈥渂rick and mortar kin.鈥� As do the personal and political stakes of disability justice, interracial alliances and colonial resistance.
Expanding Joynt鈥檚 boundary-pushing documentary practice, Singh and Joynt invite their collaborators鈥攄escendants, activists and community members鈥攖o reanimate their histories and reclaim their places therein. Through the interweaving of these diverse stories, 鈥渢he nest鈥� is transformed from a place of siloed, silenced stories into a site of radical potential. By bringing these faded spirits into the spotlight, the film asks us to consider who gets lost in the archives of history, and what we stand to gain by resurrecting them.
Presented as part of MAKE: Methods, Atmospheres, Knowledges, Energies, the 2026 conference of the Society for the Study of Affect (SSA).