The Next Wave for Storytelling:
Entertainment in a Post-Pandemic World

By Taha Qureshi, Victoria Pride Contributing Writer

With parts of the country slowly reopening, it is time to reflect on the days spent at home and consider how much entertainment we have consumed. From Netflix partying with your friends and the many family movie nights to learning new skills on YouTube, many of us chose to find strength and comfort within the stories on our screens. For the storytellers, however, the lockdown brought on a moment of reconsideration about which stories matter and how to continue telling them.

For filmmaker, director, and UVic gender studies professor Chase Joynt, who is currently social distancing and staying home in Toronto, questions about the politics of authorship have become important. “Who gets to tell what stories and when?” is now a vital aspect of consideration for Joynt as he and his team continue to work on two feature films.

“It has made me think a lot about how to make those conversations and collaborations more visible in the work itself,” says Joynt. “How do you invite audiences into the process of making rather than just arriving them at a certain point?”

Joynt’s last short film, Framing Agnes, premiered popularly at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and is now being developed into a feature, while Joynt is also in post-production with a biopic about a trans-masculine jazz musician named Billy Tipton.

“In some ways it’s easier to work, but in other ways it’s complicated. We always want to be together as a team in the end stage,” says Joynt, explaining that although having filming schedules and timelines changed has been challenging, being able to continue working while knowing that everyone he loves and cares about is safe makes it worth it.

With all the changes in how stories are being told, Joynt mentions that it is an interesting opportunity—especially for queer, trans, and racialized storytellers—to ask how they can meet mainstream audiences. Thanks to the massive increase in entertainment consumption, there is a growing curiosity to encounter different kinds of entertainment.

“Queer and trans makers have always been working outside the industrial mainstream and have always had to hustle,” says Joynt, discussing how digital content continues to positively change entertainment. Moving forward, streaming services like Netflix and HBO will have to pay attention to them. Joynt hopes for a post-pandemic world where we can seriously reimagine structures that attend to the most vulnerable pockets of our communities while also paying attention to the art and cultural production that comes out of this moment, stating that “it will be what tells the most accurate story.”

For now, as a “social creature,” Joynt is challenged by the ongoing social distancing, but he is committed to doing his part. Spending his time thinking about his priorities, mutual aid, art, and activism, he is realizing that “how you show up for the people that you love, even in distance, is more important than staying on a checklist for a world that does not currently exist.”

To check out more of Chase Joynt’s projects, you can visit https://www.chasejoynt.com/ or follow him on social media under the handle @chasejoynt.

 

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