Stripping the bones and ghosts from a childhood home in ‘The Nest’

TORONTO — This rambling beige brick house on West Gate, in Winnipeg’s storied Armstrong’s Point, has showed up a few times on movie and TV screens in its 140-year history.

It was the scene of supernatural crime in Curse of Chucky (2013), a locus of Christmas romance in Christmas in Tennessee (2018), and it was even a setting for a tale of racial tension in a rooming house in a TV episode of The Atwood Stories titled The Man from Mars (2003).

The feature documentary The Nest now tells the surprising real history of 138 West Gate from someone with her own relationship to the address.

Julietta Singh is a professor, teaching post-colonial literature and gender/sexuality studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia. She teamed with director Chase Joynt to make a film that uncovers the past residents of the house, albeit with echoes of the real-life violence and racism that touched it.

In a joint interview with Singh and Joynt at the Hot Docs film festival, Singh recalls having mostly negative associations with her childhood home.

“My experience of the house was a hard one.” It’s the repository of difficult family memories and filial violence, she says.

“But also, it was a very white and racist neighbourhood when we were growing up there. We moved there in 1980 and we were told very explicitly, ‘We don’t want your kind around here,’” says Singh, the daughter of a South Asian Sikh father and an Irish immigrant mother.

Singh left home at 15, and describes the typical boomerang process of leaving and returning though her young adulthood. She left the city in her early 20s to go to school and eventually ended up in the U.S., where she stayed.

“So my coming back and forth from Winnipeg has been to visit my mother and to visit that house over many decades,” she says.

Singh’s mother remained at the address and undertook a massive restoration project, converting the house to a bed-and-breakfast, but until recently, they did not appreciate the house’s colourful history, which provided the basis for the film.

Among past residents is Métis firebrand Annie Bannatyne, a woman credited with helping spark Louis Riel’s Red River Resistance.

The house became a makeshift boarding school, thanks to resident Mary Ettie McDermid, Manitoba’s first deaf teacher, after a fire at the School for the Deaf.

By the 1960s, it served as the Consulate General of Japan, housing consul Kumao Okazaki and his wife and daughters.

Singh learned about the house’s past as an indirect result of the pandemic.

“It really started as a research project because, in the early months and year of the pandemic, when the U.S./Canada border was closed and we were all too scared to travel anyway, I was doing a lot of like FaceTiming and Zooming with my mom,” she says.

“My mom was then in her 80s and disabled after a fall in the house and she was really struggling with the reality of having to leave the house. It was just kind of for me an intimacy-building project with my mom that didn’t have a life outside of just finding stuff out about the house.”

Collaborating with Singh on the project was Chase Joynt, a Toronto native keenly aware of the house’s Winnipeg provenance, not only geographically but artistically.

“My father was born in Winnipeg, which I hadn’t really engaged as a part of our own family history, but because of my background — I have a PhD in cinema and media studies — I understand Winnipeg as such a thriving part of experimental film traditions and also heard many stories from folks in my networks about the vibrancy of the Winnipeg art scene in particular,” Joynt says.

Co-director Julietta Singh will participate in a Q&A moderated by Kevin Nikkel after the 7 p.m. screening Thursday, Sept. 4 and the 5 p.m. screening Friday, Sept. 5. Watch the film’s trailer on Vimeo.

randall.king.arts@gmail.com