Shannon Lectures – Bonus 2025
SOLD OUT: November 19, 3:30-5:30 pm, Mayfair Theatre (1074 Bank Street).
Doors open: 3:00pm. Screening and Talkback: 3:30-5:30pm.
Title: The Nest
Convenors: Michel Hogue and Sierra Hill
Description: As part of a special Shannon Lecture this Fall, we are pleased to host the Ottawa premiere of the documentary film, The Nest on Wednesday, November 19th.
While growing up in an old Victorian mansion, Julietta Singh was certain her house was haunted. Mysterious footsteps, slamming doors, sudden gusts of wind all combined to give her childhood a gothic feel.
After her octogenarian mother falls down the stairs and is left disabled, Singh, now a decolonial scholar and writer, returns home to bid it farewell. Sensing her mother becoming one of the house’s ghosts, she sets out to find its other matriarchs, the spectres of her youth that she felt across time. What she discovers is an extraordinary archive of forgotten renegades and quiet rebels, hidden histories and silenced voices. All intimately connected over 140 years by the house.
Gracing its halls over time: a Métis revolutionary who founded the very hospital where Singh’s mother recuperates; a Deaf teacher who defied the ableist mandates of the era; the Japanese mother and daughter who lived there after wartime internment. And Singh’s own mother, a lifelong eco-feminist activist who raised mixed-race children.
In this deftly woven feature-length documentary, Singh teams up with acclaimed filmmaker Chase Joynt (Framing Agnes, No Ordinary Man) to co-direct a genre-defying cross-community portrait that challenges the settler colonial stories of belonging we’ve been taught. Common threads and uncanny coincidences emerge between the residents of “the nest” who’ve been forgotten, the women Singh comes to call her “brick and mortar kin.” As do the personal and political stakes of disability justice, interracial alliances and colonial resistance.
Expanding Joynt’s boundary-pushing documentary practice, Singh and Joynt invite their collaborators—descendants, activists and community members—to reanimate their histories and reclaim their places therein. Through the interweaving of these diverse stories, “the nest” is transformed from a place of siloed, silenced stories into a site of radical potential. By bringing these faded spirits into the spotlight, the film asks us to consider who gets lost in the archives of history, and what we stand to gain by resurrecting them.
The screening and Q&A with filmmaker Julietta Singh will be held at the Mayfair Theatre (1074 Bank Street). Doors open: 3:00pm. Screening and Talkback: 3:30-5:30pm.
It will be preceded by a more intimate discussion with filmmaker Julietta Singh and Tamara Vukusic, led by Sierra Hill (MA student) about the community collaborations at the heart of this project. The talk will take place in Dunton Tower (DT 2017), 1:00PM-2:15PM.
REGISTRATION LINK:
SOLD OUT