HotDocs Review: Chase Joynt and Julietta Singh’s The Nest

Alex Heeney reviews Chase Joynt and Julietta Singh’s The Nest, a Gothic documentary about a haunted house that reveals lesser-known parts of Winnipeg’s intersectional history.

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Chase Joynt and Julietta Singh’s The Nest is a Gothic documentary about a haunted house. The film opens outside the house before the camera wends its way around the house’s dark corridors, attics, and corners. Key storytellers in the film dress up as characters from the past, walking the house’s hallways as if they are ghosts.

The titular haunted house is Singh’s childhood home, where her mother runs a bed and breakfast. But as Singh digs into the house that never quite felt like a home to her, she uncovers 140 years of forgotten matriarchs and political rebels. The house’s previous inhabitants include a school for the Deaf and the Japanese Consulate. This allows Joynt and Singh to turn this story of one house in Winnipeg into a story of Indigenous, Deaf, Japanese, and South Asian histories — all histories that aren’t well-known or often told.

Chase Joynt continues his ‘Down with the solo author!’ documentary filmmaking project with The Nest

The Nest continues Joynt’s filmmaking project of telling stories with collaborators — both behind and in front of the camera. As he put it, “Down with the solo author!” The historical figures in The Nest are much less elusive than the transgender protagonists of No Ordinary Man and Framing Agnes. But their history has been largely erased both in Winnipeg and Canada writ large.

Like those films, the ghosts of the past characters are imaginings of people today who belong to their communities. The people Singh interviews venture inside the house to talk to Singh about its history. Mostly, it’s in these conversations between Singh and members of the Deaf, Indigenous, Japanese, and South Asian communities that the past figures who inhabited the house come to life. But we also see those same people Singh talks to dressed up in period costumes, walking through the house.

The Nest offers a look at the history of marginal communities in Winnipeg

Singh is a decolonial writer, which is part of why she becomes interested in the history of so many communities that her house was part of. But digging up the house’s history also forces her and her mother to confront their personal history in a way they hadn’t before. Singh’s father was Indian and her mother is a white-British Canadian. Singh recalls that they never explicitly discussed the racial dynamics in their relationship, nor did the family talk about the feelings of alienation in Canadian society that Singh felt because of her race. 

Now that Singh is a mother of a young daughter, we watch her digging into the past to begin to confront her trauma so that perhaps, we surmise, things won’t be haunted for her daughter. And so, as the film progresses, the house becomes more and more full of light. By the end of the film, as the film’s subjects take their places in period costumes in the house, it’s a reclaiming of this space and their right to its history.

Produced by the NFB’s Northwest Studio, The Nest continues the NFB’s tradition of pushing the boundaries of documentary filmmaking while also uncovering uniquely Canadian stories. The studio is the one behind John Ware Reclaimed, The Meaning of Empathy, and Ninth Floor. I can’t imagine The Nest being produced in any other way in any other country, and it’s one of the reasons I’m so glad the NFB exists.