BEST PICTURE EDITING IN A FEATURE DOCUMENTARY - Director's Guild of Canada | BEST ORIGINAL SCORE FOR A DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM - Canadian Screen Music Awards | OFFICIAL SELECTION - Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival
Women's History • Activism & Resistance • Decolonization • Disability Justice • Métis History • Canadian History
Date of Completion: 2025 | Run Time: 89 minutes | Languages: English, Japanese, American Sign Language with English subtitles | Captions: Yes | Includes: Transcript | Directors: Chase Joynt & Julietta Singh | Producers: Alicia Smith, Justine Pimlort, Chanda Chevannes & David Christensen | Director of Photography: Chris Romeike | Editing: Pauline Decroix | Music: Justine Delorme
At the end of her mother’s life, decolonial writer Julietta Singh returns to her childhood home to say goodbye and confront its haunted past. Investigating the house’s history, she uncovers 140 years of forgotten matriarchs and political rebels whose stories were erased. Collaborating with filmmaker Chase Joynt, Singh creates a politically charged, cross-community film that weaves together Indigenous, Deaf, Japanese, and South Asian histories linked through the home. A meditation on memory, matriarchy, and silenced voices, THE NEST asks who is lost in historical archives — and what becomes possible when those stories are recovered — reimagining a single house as a site of collective reckoning and radical potential.
AWARDS
Best Picture Editing in a Feature Documentary | Director's Guild of Canada
Best Original Score for a Documentary Feature Film | Canadian Screen Music Awards
Official Selection | Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival
FESTIVALS
Calgary International Film Festival
Hot Docs
Hamptons International Film Festival
Vancouver Queer Film Festival
Co-Director, Writer & Narrator of THE NEST
Julietta Singh is a writer and postcolonial scholar whose work engages the enduring global effects of colonization through attention to ecology, race, and gender. Singh is Stephanie Bennett-Smith Chair of Gender & Sexuality Studies and Professor of English at the University of Richmond. She is the author of three books: The Breaks (Coffee House Press, 2021), No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018), and Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke UP, 2018).Singh is co-director, writer, and narrator of the award-winning feature documentary, THE NEST (National Film Board of Canada, 2025), an epic feminist reclamation of women's histories and a cross-cultural collaboration with Red River Métis, Deaf, and Japanese Canadian communities shot in her childhood home on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Canada.
For more information visit: juliettasingh.com
Expertise
I am the researcher, community collaborator, writer, narrator, and co-director of THE NEST, a film shot entirely in and around my childhood home, and made in collaboration with with Métis, Deaf, and Japanese collaborators, as well as with my elderly mother and young daughter. I'm interested in how we can make feminist decolonial work not only across generations, but across time and cultures that are not our own. As a feminist writer and postcolonial scholar, I want everyone to think otherwise about the vital relations between political and intimate life.
Speaking History
The film premiered as a Special Presentation film at HOT DOCS in Spring, 2025. Since then, it has screened at film festivals and universities across Canada and the United States.