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Chase Joynt

Chase Joynt is a non-fiction filmmaker and writer whose latest film, State of Firsts, about Rep. Sarah McBride, is playing in theaters across the US from June 26. His documentary features The Nest (with Julietta Singh) and State of Firsts both premiered in 2025, at Hot Docs and Tribeca, respectively. His documentary feature Framing Agnes was named a Best Movie of the Year by The New Yorker after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. The film has played more than 100 festivals internationally and is distributed by Kino Lorber. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed No Ordinary Man, which was presented at Cannes Docs, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” For the CW, Chase directed episodes of Two Sentence Horror Stories which are now streaming on Netflix; his episode Elliot from Season 2 won a Telly Award for directing. He is the co-author of three non-fiction books, including the Lambda Literary Award Finalist You Only Live Twice with Mike Hoolboom and Boys Don’t Cry with Morgan M Page. His latest book, Vantage Points, was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction and named a Best Book of the Year by CBC Books, The Walrus and Autostraddle. (Photo by Amos Mac.)

A Trans Lens, a Cinema of Defiance

Chase Joynt, director of the new Sarah McBride documentary State of Firsts, considers how to define the category of “trans cinema.”

June 26, 2026