“Tony” is an impressionistic documentary portrait of one person’s struggle to form a distinct individual identity amidst the intersection of personal ambition and cultural expectation. Born to Azorean immigrants but raised in Canada throughout his infancy and adolescence, Tony Adriano’s story is characterized by complexity and contradiction. He was an aspiring musician, a restless delinquent, a rebellious brother, an honest friend; a mythical character formed in a crucible of exterior conflicts and his own unknowable interior motivations.
Combining audio testimony with visual processes of D.I.Y. hybrid analog/digital re-photography onto archival remnants, “Tony” is meditation on identity, creativity, and loss which conjures fragmented, haunted images from the ether of one family’s collective memory.