“How would I summarize the story of Billy Tipton? He was a trans-masculine jazz musician.” So speaks actor and activist Marquise Vilsón, in Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt’s brilliant No Ordinary Man, the story of jazz musician and trans icon Billy Tipton.
Tipton became a legendary jazz musician in the 1940s and 50s, but his trans identity was hidden from the larger public until his death in 1989. For decades, Tipton was considered to be a woman “passing” as a man, and not trans. Directors Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt pursue Tipton’s story, examining his brilliance as a musician, his life as a whole and his disgraceful treatment by the media, both in and after his lifetime. Not just a documentary that looks at Tipton’s history, Chin-Yee and Joynt also “audition” a number of transmasculine actors to play Tipton, and use this work to reflect upon their own journeys. “Deeply compassionate and intellectually heady.” --Inkoo Kang, The Hollywood Reporter
Director Biography
Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1983, Aisling Chin-Yee is the director of the documentary feature The Rest of Us (2019). No Ordinary Man (2020) is her latest work, which was selected for Cannes Docs 2020.
Chase Joynt is a transgender moving-image artist, writer and director who holds a BA from the UCLA School of Theater Film and Television, a PhD in Film from York University and is assistant professor of gender studies at the University of Victoria. He is the director of No Ordinary Man (2020), and the forthcoming documentary feature Framing Agnes.
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