barrunto, 2024, 70mins

We witness the island spill onto the streets demanding the return of what never quite existed, yet ‘never completely disappeared’

This quote, riffing on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s thinking*, seems like a synecdoche of barrunto, a small part that describes the whole. It helps us understand barrunto as a filmic critical practice, non-linear, and prefigurative; bringing the future into the present, while projecting the present forwards. The joy and grief of being moved by and moving in transit—between times, localities or ecologies of oppression and resistance—is the experience barrunto shares.

Here’s how Emilia describes the film, in more precise terms.

“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 coming rain is felt through aches and pains or when ants emerge anticipating an earthquake). “barrunto” is a way of thinking with surface and subconscious, underfoot and underground. 

Informed by poetry and theories of quantum entanglement across diasporic distance, barrunto is a speculative narrative using digital, archival, and 16mm film hand-processed in “grief tea.” 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.

This screening will present the film within a gently enhanced environment including vibration and light.

*Ancestral Claims – Denise Ferreira da Silva

Content Notes
Flashing images. barrunto failed the Harding Test at the following timecodes: 33:04, 38:06-38:15, 45:33, 47:12. Loud noises. Ear defenders and ear plugs will be available.