In this intimate portrait of queer life and intergenerational friendship, 80-year-old Tony describes his political activism since the 1970s, after moving from Calcutta, India to Toronto, Canada. Translated through sonic and filmic experiments, his stories and observations express the tensions inherent in solidarity and collectivity under neoliberalism.

The film’s score, co-written with musicians and the film’s cast and crew, remixes and meditates on the concept of tension, and its manifestations in sex, identity, music, touch and political struggle.

In the face of a growing politics and language of individualism, the film interrogates discourses and practices of solidarity and their enmeshment with friendship and love. Fragments of phone calls, conversations over shared meals, and tender moments captured on 16mm film portray the complexity of building community, and the hazards of reducing shared experiences of oppression to individual expressions of identity.

—Sharlene Bamboat

"barrunto” is a word used in Puerto Rico to refer to a bodily unrest, an omen or a forecast sensed via signals present in the environment (such as when rain is forecast through aches and pains or when ants emerge anticipating an earthquake).

“Barrunto” is a way of thinking with surface and subconscious, underfoot and underground. BARRUNTO is a speculative narrative informed by poetry and theories of quantum entanglement across diasporic distance. An intimate exploration of grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets to the bed; in sites of displacement, nuclear contamination, and military occupation from Scotland to Puerto Rico; from the bottom of the ocean to the planet Uranus; using digital, archival, and 16mm film hand-processed in “grief tea.”

from its deep vibration tracks to the nonlinear narrative, barrunto is a film that attempts to activate sensations and modes of being with the world and in connection beyond western frameworks of knowledge and understanding.

Made in collaboration with artists in Scotland and Puerto Rico including Sound Production by Claude Nouk, Music & Voiceover by Shanti LaLita, Archival Footage by Andrés Nieves and Karla Claudio Betancourt, Voices by Alicia Matthews & Harry Josephine Giles, Translation by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Animation by Sharif Elsabagh, integrated captions consultation by Bea Webster & Ciaran Stewart, featuring poems by Gallego, Ursula Le Guin & June Jordan.

—Emilia Beatriz

Co-presented by Third Horizon