Framing Agnes (2022)
Director: Chase Joynt Run Time: 75 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2022
Starring: Angelica Ross, Jen Richards, Max Wolf Valerio, Silas Howard, Zackary Drucker
Country: Canada, United States
Language: English
About the film:
Winner, 2022 Sundance Film Festival, NEXT Innovator Award and NEXT Audience Award
The pseudonymous Agnes was a pioneering transgender woman who participated in an infamous gender health study conducted at UCLA in the 1960s. Her clever use of the study to gain access to gender-affirming healthcare led to her status as a fascinating and celebrated figure in trans history.
In this innovative cinematic exercise featuring an all-star cast of trans performers, artists, and thinkers, director Chase Joynt uses Agnes’s story, along with others unearthed in long-shelved case files, to widen the frame through which trans history is viewed and bring to life a lineage of collaborators and conspirators who have been forgotten for far too long.
“Richly heady, thoughtful… a fascinating discussion about the transgender experience in a way that simultaneously engages with the past and present.”
—Nick Allen for RogerEbert.com
About the filmmaker:
Chase Joynt is a Canadian filmmaker, writer, video artist, actor, and professor whose work interrogates representations of gender and violence. Co-directed with Aisling Chin-Yee, his feature documentary about jazz musician and trans icon Billy Tipton, No Ordinary Man (2020), premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was named to TIFF Canada’s Top Ten. His solo feature directorial debut, the documentary Framing Agnes (2022), premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. Joynt is co-author of two books: the Lambda Literary Award Finalist “You Only Live Twice” with Mike Hoolboom, and “Boys Don’t Cry” with Morgan M. Page. He holds a BA from the UCLA School of Theater Film and Television, and a PhD in Film from York University. With Samantha Curley, Joynt runs Level Ground Productions in Los Angeles.
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