Genre
Synopsis
On New Year’s Eve 1991, 21-year-old transgender man, Brandon Teena, was murdered in Falls City, Nebraska. His death quickly became a national sensation, as reporters and true crime writers descended on the town to debate, dissect, and distill his life and identity long before they had the language or context to properly do so. Eight years later, the Oscar-winning feature film "Boys Don’t Cry" – inspired by Brandon’s life and death – was released to critical acclaim, forever crystallizing the nation’s perception of his story and what it means to be transgender. This is where our story begins.
ONE NIGHT IN NEBRASKA returns to Nebraska to reexamine the circumstances of Teena’s death and discovers extraordinary omissions in its telling – such as the murder of Phillip DeVine, a Black disabled man murdered alongside Brandon that night but erased from the reporting.
Through reenactment performed by Elliot Page as a reconfigured Brandon Teena, the film’s true crime investigation blooms into an urgent and provocative examination of modern American culture and how we represent it in media.
Bio
Chase Joynt is a non-fiction filmmaker and writer who works at the edges of genre. 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 as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress. Since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, 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. 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 in 2022. He is the co-author of two non-fiction books: the Lambda Literary Award Finalist You Only Live Twice with Mike Hoolboom and Boys Don’t Cry with Morgan M Page. At present, Chase is in post production on The Nest, a feature documentary made in collaboration with Julietta Singh, and his next book Vantage Points is forthcoming in Fall 2024 from Arsenal Pulp Press. With Samantha Curley, he runs Level Ground Productions in Los Angeles.
Credits
Executive Producer - Elliot Page
Executive Producers - Lightbox
