FRAMING AGNES

Join Film Fatales and The Bentonville Film Foundation on Friday, January 21st at 2pm PT for a discussion with the creative team behind Framing Agnes in advance of its Sundance premiere. Speakers include director Chase Joynt, cinematographer Aubree Bernier-Clark, producer Samantha Curley, and editors Brooke Sebold and Cecilio Esocobar. Moderated by Stephanie Owens.

In 1958, a young trans woman named Agnes entered a study about sex disorders at UCLA to get the gender-affirming care she needed, by any means necessary. Her story was long considered to be exceptional until never-before-seen case files of other patients were found in 2017. Directed by Chase Joynt (NO ORDINARY MAN) and featuring an all-star cast of transgender artists and actors, FRAMING AGNES uses re-enactment and genre-blurring storytelling techniques to breathe new life into previously unknown people who redefined gender in the midcentury. Featuring Angelica Ross, Jen Richards, Zackary Drucker, Silas Howard, Max Wolf Valerio, and Stephen Ira.

This panel discussion will be accessible with auto captions.

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Chase Joynt is a director and writer whose films have won jury and audience awards internationally. His next documentary feature, FRAMING AGNES, will premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed NO ORDINARY MAN, a feature-length documentary about jazz musician Billy Tipton, which was presented at Cannes Docs 2020 as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress. Since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2020, NO ORDINARY MAN has been hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” The film has won 9 awards on the international festival circuit, including being named to TIFF Canada’s Top Ten. Joynt’s first book “You Only Live Twice” (co-authored with Mike Hoolboom) was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and named one of the best books of the year by The Globe and Mail and CBC. Chase also directed episodes of “Two Sentence Horror Stories” for the CW, which are now streaming on Netflix. With Samantha Curley, Chase runs Level Ground Productions, a collaboratively run production company in Los Angeles.

Aubree Bernier-Clarke (they/them) is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles and Portland, OR. After spending their formative years playing guitar in the bands Half-Seas-Over and Swan Island, Aubree pursued a career in film as the Senior Creative Producer at Portland-based production company Field Recordings, and as a camera operator on the IFC hit Portlandia. In 2013, Aubree relocated to Los Angeles to participate in AFI’s eminent DWW directing workshop, through which they developed their award-winning narrative short, The Night Is Ours, starring Bex Taylor-Klaus. In 2019, Aubree’s documentary short A Normal Girl, about intersex activist Pidgeon Pagonis, premiered at BFI Flare in London and the American Pavilion at Cannes Film Festival, and in 2020 won the Grand Jury Award for Best Short Documentary at the United Nations Association Film Festival. Aubree has created original EPKs for the films Booksmart, Kajillionaire and Where’d You Go Bernadette, as well as the television shows Transparent and I Love Dick. Aubree has also directed branded and commercial work for Levi’s, Honda, Toyota, HGTV, Liftmaster, Dewars, Amazon Studios and Annapurna Pictures, among others. Aubree frequently explores themes of gender, queerness and social justice in their work. Aubree now splits their time between LA and Portland, where they share a pink house with their wife and friends of both the furry and feathered varieties.

Brooke Stern Sebold is a nonbinary filmmaker/artist born and raised in Tucson, Arizona. Her work investigates gender and identity through writing, directing, editing, producing, and daydreaming. Brooke has cut five feature films including ALASKA IS A DRAG (Netflix) and FRAMING AGNES (Sundance, 2022), which she also co-produced. Brooke also cut and co-produced FRAMING AGNES the short, which premiered at Tribeca in 2019. In 2007, Brooke co-directed the feature doc RED WITHOUT BLUE, which won the audience award at Slamdance and the jury award at Frameline. Brooke recently served as story consultant on the Amazon doc-series ALWAYS JANE. Currently, she edits the Emmy-nominated series, BRIEF BUT SPECTACULAR, which airs weekly on PBS NewsHour. Brooke loves crystals, doggies, triangles, and they/them pronouns sometimes.

Samantha Curley is an independent producer and creative entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. She is the Co-Founder of Level Ground Collective, a 501(c)3 artist collective and production incubator creating experiments in empathy. Together with Chase Joynt, she also runs Level Ground Productions, a collaborative production company engaging the most important issues of the contemporary moment. Her first film, FRAMING AGNES (dir. Chase Joynt) premiered as a short at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and will premiere as a feature at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. She’s also currently in production on JFK8 (dir. Brett Story and Steve Maing) which follows a group of Amazon workers in their fight to unionize. Since 2013, Samantha has produced dozens of short films, podcasts, community events, and gallery installations. Her film projects have screened at festivals and won awards around the world, and she’s received support from IDA, Field of Vision, Catapult, Ford Foundation, Just Films, Gotham, Hot Docs, XTR, and more. Samantha graduated with a B.S. from Northwestern University’s School of Communication, an M.A. in Theology and the Arts from Fuller Seminary, and received an Executive Scholar Certificate from the Kellogg School of Management. In her free time she serves on the founding steering committee of the Eastside Women’s Film Club, plays on a women’s recreational basketball team in Los Angeles, and is a community organizer in LA’s Echo Park neighborhood.

Cecilio Escobar is a video artist, editor, and technician living and working in Toronto. His art is self-reflective performative documentary. Escobar holds a BFA from OCAD University and is the recipient of a Canada Council Media Arts Grant for his latest documentary project, LatinX; an exploration of the intersections between his gender and cultural identities. He currently is also the Communications Director for Toronto’s Queer Film Festival.