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Chase Joynt
Director and filmmaker From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Chase Joynt is a Canadian filmmaker, writer, video artist, actor, producer, and professor. He attracted acclaim as co-director with Aisling Chin-Yee of the documentary film No Ordinary Man (2020),[1] and as director of the film Framing Agnes (2022).[2] He won two awards at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival for his work on the latter.[3]
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Filmmaking
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Joynt has directed a number of feature and short documentary films, and has worked in fiction filmmaking as well. He won the Emerging Canadian Artist award at the 2012 Inside Out Film and Video Festival for Akin; in the same year, he had an acting role in John Greyson's web series Murder in Passing.[4][5]
In 2020 he received a grant from Inside Out's Re:Focus Emergency Relief Fund for the completion of a feature film edition of Framing Agnes,[6] which later premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival,[2] where Joynt won both the Audience Award and the Innovator Prize in the NEXT program.[3] In 2023, the film was part of the keynote event for the Moving Trans History Forward conference at the University of Victoria, which included a public screening of Framing Agnes and a panel discussion with Jen Richards, Jules Gill-Peterson, Morgan M Page, and Joynt himself.[7][8]
No Ordinary Man
Co-directed with Aisling Chin-Yee, No Ordinary Man (film) was Joynt's first feature film. [9] For decades, the life of American Jazz musician Billy Tipton was framed as the story of an ambitious woman passing as a man in pursuit of a music career.[10] In No Ordinary Man, Tipton’s story is re-imagined and performed by trans artists as they collectively paint a portrait of an unlikely hero.[11] Together, the filmmakers join Tipton’s son Billy Jr. to reckon with a complicated and contested legacy.[12]
No Ordinary Man was presented at Cannes Docs 2020 as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2020. IndieWire called the film "an elegant riff on a classic progression that arrives at something transcendent."[13]
Framing Agnes
Expanding on his 2019 short film of the same name, Framing Agnes was Joynt's second feature film. [14] After discovering case files from a 1950s gender clinic, a cast of trans actors turn a talk show inside out to confront the legacy of a young trans woman forced to choose between honesty and access. [15] Agnes, the pioneering, pseudonymized, transgender woman who participated in Harold Garfinkel’s gender health research at UCLA in the 1960s, has long stood as a figurehead of trans history. [16] In this rigorous cinematic exercise that blends fiction and nonfiction, director Chase Joynt explores where and how her platform has become a pigeonhole. [17] Framing Agnes endeavors to widen the frame through which trans history is viewed — one that has remained too narrow to capture the multiplicity of experiences eclipsed by Agnes’. [18] Through a collaborative practice of reimagination, an impressive lineup of trans stars (Zackary Drucker, Angelica Ross, Jen Richards, Max Wolf Valerio, Silas Howard, and Stephen Ira) take on vividly rendered, impeccably vintage reenactments, bringing to life groundbreaking artifacts of trans healthcare. [19]
Sundance Film Festival said of the film: "Joynt’s signature form-rupturing style radically reenvisions the imposition of the frame on the cultural memory of transness through his brilliantly crafted, communally-driven excavation. This reclamation tears away with remarkable precision the myth of isolation as the mode of existence of transgender history-makers, breathing new life into a lineage of collaborators and conspirators who have been forgotten for far too long." [20]
Framing Agnes won both the Next Innovator Award and the Audience Award from the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.[21]
Two Sentence Horror Stories
Alongside documentary features, Joynt has also directed an episode of Two Sentence Horror Stories (produced by The CW and available on Netflix) about a young transgender boy who is being bullied in high school.[22] Joynt's episode was featured as part of an Emmy Awards campaign by Warner Bros. and TheWrap and won a Telly Award for Directing in 2022.[23] That same year, Joynt was awarded the Dream Maker Award by the Cleveland International Film Festival, which recognized a “trailblazing director in contemporary LGBTQ cinema.”[24]
The Nest
Made in collaboration with Julietta Singh and The National Film Board of Canada, The Nest is a feature-length documentary directed by Joynt.[25] At the end of her mother’s life, decolonial writer Julietta Singh returns to say goodbye to her childhood home.[26] As she digs into the history of the house, she uncovers 140 years of forgotten matriarchs and political histories she never knew.[27] In this genre-defying cross-community collaboration, a single home is transformed from a place of siloed stories into a site of radical potential.[28]
The Nest won the Top 20 Audience Favourite Award at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival 2025.[29]
State of Firsts
State of Firsts is an all-access documentary following Sarah McBride’s historic run to become the first transgender member of Congress.[30] Throughout her campaign, she navigates the complex terrain between activist and electoral strategies for change, confronting mounting pressure from her constituents.[31] On the night that Sarah wins, so too does Trump, underscoring a nation intensely divided and sending Sarah to an increasingly hostile new workplace. [32] Immediately after her victory, Sarah becomes the target of MAGA Republicans who ban her from using the restrooms in the Capitol, sparking national outrage and drawing attention to the escalating threats on trans people and trans rights. [33] The film leaves her on the doorstep of her new job, facing high-stakes decisions under the pressure of the national spotlight.[34]
State of Firsts premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival.[35]
Short Films
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Joynt's short films have screened internationally, winning the Jury Award for Best Documentary (Bengaluru), Jury Award for Best Short (Ecuador), Jury Award for Most Promising Filmmaker (Regent Park), Audience Award for Best Documentary Short (Seattle) and the EP Canada/ Canada Film Capital Award for Emerging Canadian Artist (Toronto), Best Experimental Short (Los Angeles), Juror Award (Ann Arbor, Michigan), Audience Award for Best Documentary Short (Seattle).[36]
Joynt's most well-known short films include Framing Agnes, Between You and Me, Genderize, I’m Yours, and Akin. The feature-length version of Framing Agnes is based on a short film of the same name (co-directed with Kristen Schilt) that premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Festival.[37] Between You and Me (2016) interrogates the intersectional relationship between moral panics, desire, and identity through dialogue with the daughter of a pastor who is currently incarcerated for child sexual abuse.[38] Shot over five years, Genderize (2016) captures a buoyant cohort of three siblings as they navigate gender, puberty and parents in a rapidly changing cultural environment.[39] Both Between You and Me and Genderize were acquired for online distribution by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.[40] [41] I’m Yours (2012) satirically responds to the pressure placed on transitioning subjects to answer endless, invasive questions about their identities by the media.[42] Akin (2012) reckons with legacies of intergenerational sexual violence through shared kinship between Joynt's decision to transition and his mother’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism.[43]
Level Ground Productions
Level Ground Productions is co-run by Samantha Curley and Chase Joynt, and is a 501(c)(3) organization non-profit of the same name. Level Ground is a documentary production company exploring the edges of genre and story. Notable films include Union (film) (2024) which won a Special Jury award for the Art of Change at the Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Oscars, and Framing Agnes (2022) which won the NEXT Innovator Award and Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary.[44]
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Writing
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In 2016, Joynt and Mike Hoolboom coauthored the non-fiction book You Only Live Twice: Sex, Death and Transition.[45] In this genre-transcending book, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom come together over the films of Chris Marker to exchange transition tales, confessional missives that map out the particularities of occupying what they call ‘second lives’: Chase’s transition from female to male and Mike’s near-death from AIDS.[46] Weaving cultural theory with memoir and media analysis, YOLT asks intimate questions about what it might mean to find love and hope through conversation across generations.[47] The book received a Lambda Literary Award nomination for Transgender Non-Fiction at the 29th Lambda Literary Awards in 2017.[48]
With Boys Don't Cry (2022), Chase Joynt and Morgan M. Page relocate Boys Don't Cry (1999 film) in a way that attends to the story’s violence and values, both on and off screen.[49] Hailed as groundbreaking upon its original release, the Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry offered the first mainstream access to transmasculine embodiment in North America, one that many simultaneously celebrated and rejected.[50] More than two decades after its original release, the film has become a lightning rod for contemporary debates about the representation of trans lives and deaths on screen.[51] Morgan M. Page and Chase Joynt argue that new visibilities of transness on screen require us to re-engage earlier portrayals: Boys Don't Cry (1999 film) is central to conversations about casting, violence against gender non-conforming people, and the borders between butch and trans identities.[52] Acknowledging a younger generation of queer and trans people who are straining against the images foisted upon them, including this film’s egregious violence, and an older cohort for whom it remains a formative, if complicated, touchstone, Joynt and Page revisit the original contexts of production and distribution to unsettle the overdetermined ways the work has been understood and interpreted.[53] The Times Literary Supplement called this work "a manifesto for future trans representation."[54]
In September 2024, Joynt published his third book, titled Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir.[55] Following the death of the family patriarch, a box of newly procured family documents reveals writer-filmmaker Chase Joynt's previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan.[56] Vantage Points takes up the surprising appearance of McLuhan in Joynt's family archive as a way to think about legacies of childhood sexual abuse and how we might process and represent them.[57] Joynt writes about difficult pasts and connects them to contemporary politics and ways of being, employing McLuhan's seminal Understanding Media as an inciting framework.[58] Vantage Points is a kaleidoscopic reckoning with the impact of media and masculinity on the stories we tell about ourselves and our families, a unique and highly visual approach to trans life writing, and an experimental move between gender and genre.[59] For this work, Joynt received a nomination for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.[60]
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Teaching
The opening of Joynt's self-description on the University of Victoria website reads: "After seeing my work in public, people often ask: "Are you a film person invested in gender theory or a gender studies person who also makes films?" The boundaries, investments and tensions revealed by these questions are emblematic of my interdisciplinary artistic practice and scholarly pursuits." [61] After his Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles and his Master of Arts at York University, in 2016 Joynt obtained his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from York University. Since 2019, Joynt has been an assistant professor of gender studies at the University of Victoria.[62] Rooted in collaborative, practice-based research, Joynt's classes meet at the intersection of cultural productions and Gender Studies.[63]
Personal life
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