Film Screening: If From Every Tongue it Drips with artist Sharlene Bamboat

Sharlene Bamboat is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist working primarily in non-fiction moving image. Sound and experimental sonic strategies are central to her practice, and her films often emerge from deep listening and experimentation in collaboration with others. Her works have been exhibited internationally, including at venues such as: Berlinale Forum Expanded, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Art of the Real NYC among many more. In addition to her artistic practice, Sharlene works in the cultural sector, contributing to artist-run organizations and collectives in Canada, and working as a creative producer with artists both locally and internationally.

If from Every Tongue It Drips // 2021 // 68 min.

Premiere : Berlinale Forum Expanded

If From Every Tongue it Drips is a film that uses the framework of quantum physics to explore the ways that personal relationships and political movements at once transcend and challenge time, space, identity and location.

The film follows the lives of a couple living in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, one of whom writes Rekhti, a form of 19th century, Urdu, queer poetry; the other, her lover, the camera operator. As their personal lives unfold on camera, the lines between rehearsal and reality, location and distance, self and other dissipate and reinforce one another.

Simultaneously, through poet and camera operator’s daily lives, interconnections between British colonialism, Indian nationalism and the impact of both on contemporary poetry, dance and music in South Asia is revealed.

In conversation with:

Am Johal is the author of Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene, and co-author with Matt Hern of Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale and O My Friends, There is No Friend: The Politics of Friendship at the End of Ecology. He is Chair of the Vancouver International Film Festival and Vice-Chair of Greenpeace Canada. In 2025, he was Curator-in-Residence at the Indian Summer Festival.

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