As she prepares to say goodbye to her childhood home and her ailing mother, a decolonial writer uncovers generations of forgotten matriarchs and rebels whose intertwined lives transform the house into a living archive of resistance.
When her elderly mother’s life draws to a close, decolonial writer and educator Julietta Singh returns to the Victorian home she once believed was haunted and uncovers 140 years of hidden histories within its walls. Co-directed with filmmaker Chase Joynt, the film is shaped through close collaboration with the Manitoba Métis Federation, the Manitoba School for the Deaf and the Japanese Cultural Association of Manitoba, whose members help reanimate their own silenced pasts. Blending archival research, collective memory and imaginative re-embodiment, the house is transformed from a site of private memory into a living archive of matriarchal resistance. The film asks who is lost in official histories—and what radical possibilities emerge when communities reclaim their place within them.
This film is intended to be screened with captions.
The Nest, Chase Joynt & Julietta Singh, provided by the National Film Board of Canada