Tucked away at UCLA in a rusted-shut filing cabinet, a treasure trove of transcripts of interviews with transgender people in the ‘50s and ‘60s was unearthed. Rediscovered nearly 70 years later, what do these stories tell us about ourselves today and how history gets told?

Director Chase Joynt (No Ordinary Man) and a star-studded team of trans filmmakers and actors including Zackary Drucker, Angelica Ross, Jen Richards, Max Wolf Valerio, and Silas Howard breathe new life into these transcripts in this thoughtfully crafted, deeply contemplative film. Through Joynt’s signature style—an astute hybrid of fiction and nonfiction—Framing Agnes blends staged scenes where the actors reenact the interviews with behind-the-scenes footage where the actors, as themselves, reflect on the material through a lens of our current culture and their own experiences.

Winner of both the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award at Sundance, this self-reflexive documentary reframes trans stories just as it retools our expected tropes of nonfiction storytelling. Framing Agnes is sure to become required viewing for anyone wanting a more nuanced, inclusive view of the past to help make sense of the present.