Our film uncovers over 140 years of lost stories from the incredible women who lived in the same house

Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2025 edition by directors Julietta Singh and Chase Joynt focuses on their film The Nest

Julietta Singh: I've always had a fascination with the idea of home and with practices of homemaking. I grew up on Treaty 1 territory in central Winnipeg. I was the child of two immigrant parents. My mother was born in Ireland to a German-Jewish mother whose life was indelibly shaped by the Holocaust, and my father was a child survivor of the Partition of India, the lasting effects of which South Asians are still trying to untangle to this day.

As a racialized child in a world that felt exceedingly white, where Indigenous struggle was visible and felt, I was keenly aware that I was not in any sense "at home." Now an immigrant myself who resides in the United States, "home" has remained a vexing idea, an ongoing crisis and a political promise. What I mean by this is that there are many ways of being at home, of reimagining home, that can reform our intimate, social and political lives. And it's from this place that I set out to make The Nest, an epically collaborative and cross-cultural experiment.

In the winter of 2020, thick in the pandemic, I began to research the history of my childhood home, a place of intense filial struggle in my youth and a place my mother has lived in for over four decades. She purchased The Nest, a languishing beige brick mansion on the banks of the Assiniboine River, in 1980 for the cost of the land, against my father's wishes. She spent the rest of her life devoted to its restoration and preservation until, at age 80, while running the home as a bed and breakfast, she fell backwards down a flight of stairs to the third floor. Left partially paralyzed by the fall, her life in that grand colonial home would never be the same.

The Nest began as a way of helping my mother say goodbye to the place by situating her amidst a world of other women whose lives had unfolded in the house. It was also a way of collaboratively reclaiming lost matriarchal histories, and of recreating my own conflicted relationship to the place through the process. Little did I imagine when I set out on the project that it would become a feature film. Nor could I have dreamed that it would become a history-altering undertaking that would challenge settler colonial narratives and tie me indelibly to Métis, Deaf and Japanese communities in Winnipeg, fundamentally changing my relationship to the city of my youth.

Through archival research and gathering oral histories, I learned new and mind-blowing stories of the house's forgotten pasts: its ties to the Red River Resistance and the legendary Métis matriarch, Annie Bannatyne; its connection to the Manitoba School for the Deaf and Mary Ettie McDermid, the first Deaf teacher in Western Canada; and the quieter domestic legacies of girls and women like Mrs. Okazaki [the wife of consul-general Kumao Okazaki] and her daughter Masa, who lived in the house when it served as the Japanese Consulate of Manitoba. At the time of all these wild discoveries, I was taking pandemic walks with my filmmaker friend Chase and regaling him with my findings. At some point, he declared: "This is my next film project!" Not long after, we stumbled on a fallen bird's nest and took it as a green light from the universe. (The little cup nest still lives on my mantle.)

As a writer, I was of course daunted by the prospect of diving headlong into a feature film. But I knew Chase's obsessive commitment to collaboration, and I had become deeply enmeshed with all the participating community members and felt there was something unequivocally visual about inviting communities back into the house to reimagine and reclaim their own lost histories. 

Chase Joynt: Yes, this walking story and my reaction to Julietta is very true! I knew immediately, and with great clarity, that her authorial vision and steadfast commitment to telling stories otherwise was fertile ground to build a film. 

From the earliest stages of project development, we committed to a constraint: to tell these 140-plus years of interlocking stories within the confines of a single space. Like all boundaries, extraordinary potential emerged from this frame. We began to explore how we could invest in architecture, production design, cinematography, wardrobe and music composition such that the audience could feel they were being transported through time, while also recognizing they were staying rooted in one place. Our approach extended far beyond the material to consider, more philosophically and experientially, how we are intimately stitched together in ways we are not taught to assume or anticipate. 

For me personally, The Nest offered an exciting departure from making films about trans life to thinking more capaciously about transness as a method of cinematic approach, one that can hold stories on thresholds which endeavour to communicate more than one position, time period or subjectivity simultaneously.

For us collectively, the project began long before we went to camera and continues to transform long after the experiences translated onscreen. It is from this position, the potential for documentary to be understood as practice far beyond product, that we hope The Nest offers its most enduring imprint. 

The Nest screens at Hot Docs on April 30. More information is available by clicking here.