barrunto (Spanish)
The short film through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me will be followed by the feature presentation of barrunto.
through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me
Morgan Sears-Williams • 4 min • Canada • 2024
Morgan Sears-Williams’s expressive 16mm work, through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me, captures lovers kissing at Toronto’s Hanlan’s Point Beach, their intimate moments overlaid with a second strip of film, hole-punched and painstakingly taped together. A resonant piece, it lingers on the tenderness between lovers, set against the fluid waters of the beach. The hole-punched film acts as a symbolic peephole, reflecting the cruising areas on the beach that invite both spectatorship and participation. Meditating on tenderness and care, environmental erosion, and queer activist history, the work thoughtfully navigates complex themes of pleasure and political resistance.
barrunto
Emilia Beatriz • 70 min • Puerto Rico/UK • 2024
Emilia Beatriz’s expansive debut feature, barrunto (2024), unfolds to explore transversal relations and speculative fictions. The film’s title, barrunto, refers to a sensation of bodily unrest or an omen, a feeling that anticipates change, often sensed through embodied or environmental signals—like aching bones before rain or the emergence of ants before an earthquake. This sensorial language and environmental engagement permeates barrunto, translating grief, longing, and resistance into visceral forms. Emphasizing collective poetics across borders over authoritative authorship, barrunto is written in collaboration with artists Shanti LaLita, Claude Nouk, Alicia Matthews, Harry Josephine Giles, Nicole Cecilia Delgado.
Blending digital, archival, and hand-processed 16mm film, barrunto never settles, drifting from the streets of Puerto Rico, to the sites of nuclear contamination and military occupation in Scotland, and even as far as the bottom of the ocean and the planet Uranus. Poetic and ruminating, barrunto is a shifting response and attempt to think through the embodied ethics and interdependence of co-existence between human and non-human.