These scenes are interspersed with the actors speaking about their own real-life experiences, exuding the very sense of community those early representations of transness sorely lacked. The director hired a cast of trans talents, including actresses and advocates Zackary Drucker, Angelica Ross and Jen Richards, to reenact the conversations from those very case files in talk-show format, all while playing Garfinkel himself. In Joynt'sgenre-defying work, it means bringing these people to life in a far more vivid way - quite literally, at least in cinematic terms. “So what does it mean when Agnes lives in the hands and experiences of trans people?”
“We know, as minoritized subjects, that our histories are often buried and erased by systemically racist and exclusionary institutional practices and protocols,” says the director in an interview from his Toronto home. The documentary centres the pseudonymous Agnes Torres, a young trans woman who participated in Garfinkel's study in order to get the gender-affirming care she needed.įor years, hers was considered an anomalous case - until Joynt, along with sociology professor Kristen Schilt, stumbled into Torres's interviews from the study,along with eight other case files that proved she was far from alone.īy examining these stories through the lens of the trans community, Joynt's hope is to share these unheard stories and grant them a contemporary historical context. The film screens Thursday at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto and is available forstreaming via Hot Docs at Home. It's a framework that led Joynt to the story covered in his latest documentary, “Framing Agnes,” which explores long-buried case files involving transgender people in a 1950s study led by sociologist Harold Garfinkel at UCLA. So he often wonders, “Who gets to tell which stories, why, and from what place? And why does it matter?” The Canadian filmmaker is well aware trans folks featured in the genre often haven't been involved in a key way behind the lens, or as part of the creative process. Chase Joynt knows documentaries haven't always portrayed trans and gender-diverse subjects in a fair or accurate light.
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