Toto Forever

While delivering a package, Toto, a young postman lost in daydreams of freedom and love, discovers an injured man lying beside a swimming pool. The stranger, Mark, is a gangster with serious trouble with the mob.

United by danger and desire, they flee together along the open road. But their brief escape turns into a fable about love, loss, and the fragile beauty of hope.

Toto Forever is a poetic and symbolic short film by Spanish director Roberto F. Canuto, shot on Super 16mm as part of his projects at the New York Film Academy in Hollywood. The film blends romantic drama, crime, and fantasy to tell a universal story about courage and emotional truth.

Strongly influenced by the aesthetics and narrative of Japanese yaoi (Boys’ Love), with straightforward storytelling and characters drawn in an almost comic-like style, the film transforms a tragic love story into a visual fable about purity, desire, and transcendence. It evokes a moment suspended in time, in which the human spirit, after loss, manages to recover and rediscover faith in life and in love.

Premiered at the first Kashish Mumbai International Film Festival — India’s first LGBT film festival following the decriminalization of homosexuality — Toto Forever opened the event and was subsequently screened at more than thirty international film festivals worldwide.