Murmurations

Isolated during the COVID lockdowns, filmmaker Xavier Marrades remains in his hometown in Spain, while his lover is in Brazil. As voice messages pass back and forth between them, the filmmaker finds ways to build poetic bridges between distant places and times.

Hypnotic clouds of starlings sweep in waves across the evening sky. Filming their collective movements, the filmmaker finds echoes of his own experience living with HIV. Interwoven with them are archival glimpses of New York’s early AIDS activism and Afro-Brazilian Candomblé rituals — spiritual ceremonies rooted in ancestral memory and collective strength. At first, the snippets Marrades sprinkles throughout the film seem unrelated, but gradually their subtle parallels emerge.

A rich and deeply textured film, Murmurations invites the viewer to reflect on life in all of its complex and precious details: the intimate vulnerability of an individual and the resilience of a group; repetitions in history, and the awareness of the generations come before you.