Timetable

Framing Agnes

Chase Joynt

CA
2022
Documentary
75’
OmU
desired! – film lust and queer

A group of queer people from the arts and academia explore a study that contains fragments of the lives of trans people of times past. This was a major health study conducted in Los Angeles in the 1950s. So, what happens when we read it today? What do we want to know about the people from that era? And how do we relate to them now? Framing Agnes is an attempt to connect with the past, reimagining the people from back then through the lens of today’s perspectives. The film takes a carefully and lovingly constructed approach. It centres around a television programme that tries out reenactments of interviews with the people who took part in the study. The actors themselves also reflect on their portrayal of the historical individuals. The archive provided for the film enables early trans biographies to be narrated and seen. But what can actually be seen? What is our desire for looking into the archive? The film poses these very questions, thus conducting a dialogue in the present that tries to cautiously approach the past. The aim is to not talk about the characters from an outsider’s perspective, which makes it vital that the project has its own queer cast and crew. Chase Joynt, as the director, is also visible in the film’s narrative, conducting the conversations himself in the fictional television studio.

This film deals with the experience of violence.


Awards for »Framing Agnes«
NEXT Innovator Award, NEXT Audience Award – Sundance Film Festival 2022 | Sky Documentaries Award – MiX Milano 2022 | Best Canadian Film – Queer North Film Festival Ontario 2022 | Audience Award for Best Feature – XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin 2022 | Documentary Jury Award – Wicked Queer Film Festival 2022 | Special Recognition Award for International Doc Feature: Social Impact – Thin Line Film Festival 2022

Director

Chase Joynt

Script

Chase Joynt, Morgan M Page

Cinematography

Aubree Bernier-Clarke

Editing

Brook Sebold, Cecilio Escobar

Cast

Zackary Drucker, Jules Gill-Peterson, Silas Howard, Angelica Ross, Kristen Schilt, Max Wolf Valerio

Contact

The Film Collaborative

Chase Joynt

Chase Joynt

Chase Joynt is a film-maker, writer and academic. Framing Agnes is his documentary feature film debut. He previously collaborated with Aisling Chin-Yee on the cinematic portrait No Ordinary Man, about jazz musician Billy Tipton.
Joynt is an Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Victoria in Canada. Accompanying the film Framing Agnes is the publication Conceptualising Agnes: Exemplary Cases and the Disciplines of Gender, which he is working on with Kristen Schilt. His academic and artistic work are closely interlinked, with documentary films, media studies, trans* studies, queer studies and feminist theory among his specialist fields.


Films by Chase Joynt
No Ordinary Man 2020