GABRIEL ABRANTES

Videos
Gabriel Abrantes explores cinematographic language in his production of films and
videos – he writes, directs, produces and often acts in them. He addresses historical,
political and social matters while discussing postcolonial, gender and identity issues.
His works create layers of unlikely readings by altering traditional narratives and touch
upon the absurd, folklore, humor and politics. Hollywood aesthetics are mixed with
documentary techniques, and avant-garde strategies are crossed with archaic
technologies. Often funny, disconcerting, and provocative, his work suggests ambiguous
readings of sensitive issues by twisting and perverting the viewer’s traditional
expectations.
Os Humores Artificiais (The Artificial Humors)
By Gabriel Abrantes
2016, S16mm to HD, 29 Min
Language: Portuguese
Produced by Herma Films
With Amanda Rodarte, Gilda Nomacce, Ivo Müller
https://vimeo.com/180609583
Password: Humores Artificiais
Os humores artificiais [The Artificial Humours] (2016), was shot in Mato
Grosso (Canarana and the Yawalapiti and Kamayura villages inside the
Xingu Indigenous Park) and São Paulo. The film tells the story of a journey
of an indigenous comedian who joins a robot and becomes famous in
Brazil’s mainstream cultural industry. The uncanny film makes an issue of
the humorous habits of various indigenous groups in contrast to progress
and artificial intelligence.
A Brief History of Princess X
By Gabriel Abrantes A history of sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s infamous ‘Princess X’, a
2016, S16mm to HD, 7 Min futuristic bronze phallus that is actually a bust portrait of Napoleon’s equally
Language: English infamous great grand niece, Marie Bonaparte.
Produced by Herma films and Les Films du Bélier
With Joana Barrios, Francisco Cipriano
https://vimeo.com/150629410
Password: princessx
The Hunchback
By Gabriel Abrantes and Ben Rivers In a dystopian future, Dalaya.com, a big brother like cooperation, forces
2016, S16mm to HD, 28 Min their under-performing employees to ‘volunteer‘ as participants in
Language: English historical reenactments.
Produced by A Mutual Respect Productions Les Films du Bélier
With Carloto Cotta, Gustavo Sumpta, Anton Skrzypiciel, et al.

https://vimeo.com/164748759
Password: hunchback
Freud Und Friends
By Gabriel Abrantes A freewheeling homage to both Woody Allen’s Sleeper and reality TV,
2014, S16mm to HD, 24 Min Freud und Friends is a headlong dive (narrated by “Herner Werzog”) into
Language: English the deepest, silliest recesses of the artist’s unconscious.
Produced by Gabriel Abrantes, IndieLisboa, and CAC-Genève
With Gabriel Abrantes, Sónia Balaco, Carloto Cotta, Filipa Anika
https://vimeo.com/205314095
Password: Freud Und Friends
Taprobana
By Gabriel Abrantes A sensuous and debauched portrait of Portugal’s national poet Luís Vaz de
2014, S16mm to HD, 24 Min Camões teetering on the borderline between Paradise and Hell.
Language: Portuguese, Singhalese
Produced by A Mutual Respect Productions
With Jani Zhao, Natxo Checa, Gabriel Abrantes
https://vimeo.com/85267274
Password: taprobana
Ennui Ennui
By Gabriel Abrantes This delirious espionage farce (whose cast includes Edith Scob and Esther
2013, HD, 30 Min Garrel) resembles what might have happened if Zero Dark Thirty had been
Language: French, Farsi, English written by Georges Bataille.
Produced by Les Films du Bélier
With Edith Scob, Laeticia Dosch, Esther Garrel, Omid Rawendah,
Breshna Bahar, Aref Banuhar, Asif Mawdoodi, Stephan Rizon
https://vimeo.com/76346621
password: ennui ennui
Ornithes
By Gabriel Abrantes This film documents the staging of Aristophanes’ Birds in the original Attic
2013, S16mm to HD, 17 Min Greek in Jacmel, Haiti.
Language: Haitian Creole, Attic Greek
Produced by A Mutual Respect Productions
With Junior Casseus, Tilmé Stéphanie, Katia Lucianne Picard,
Anise Dieudanné, Antoine Beaunéfils, Nicolas Charment

https://vimeo.com/72309690
Password: ornithes
Fratelli
By Gabriel Abrantes and Alexandre Melo Gabriel Abrantes and Alexander Melo deconstruct the first section of
2011, S16mm to HD,, 17 Min Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew as a playful, vibrant ode to bacchanalia,
Language: Portuguese classicism, and homoeroticism.
Produced by A Mutual Respect Productions and A Vida Artística
With Filipe Vargas, Carloto Cotta, Alexandre David, Claudio Filippo
https://vimeo.com/72330899
Password: fratelli
Baby Back Costa Rica
By Gabriel Abrantes Three teenage girls are followed on an ominous drive home, discussing
2011, S16mm to HD,, 6 Min shared acquaintances, cars, and Judaism as a swimming pool straight out
Language: Portuguese of David Hockney awaits.
Produced by A Mutual Respect Productions
With Dory Castro, Mariana Roberto, Nuria Coelho, Joana Nascimento
https://vimeo.com/74361577
Password: baby back costa rica
Liberdade
By Gabriel Abrantes and Benjamin Crotty Shot in Luanda, Angola, this visually ravishing tale of romance, crime, and
2011, S16mm transfer to HD, 17 Min erectile dysfunction chronicles the relationship between an Angolan boy
Language: Port., Mandarin, English and a Chinese girl as they attempt to forge a shared, transcultural identity.
Produced by A Mutual Respect Productions
With Wilson Teixeira, Betty Meixue, Orlando Sergio
https://vimeo.com/74361575
Password: liberdade
Palácios de Pena
By Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt A radically stylized, era- and genre-scrambling amalgam of coming-ofage
2011, S16mm transfer to HD, 59 Min melodrama, medieval pageant, and political allegory. Two teenage sisters
Language: Portuguese cope with the death of their grandmother, their long-standing rivalry, and
Produced by A Mutual Respect Productions their inheritance of an immense castle with a shadowy Fascist past.
With Alcina Abrantes, Andreia Martins, Catarina Gaspar
https://vimeo.com/74361574
password: palacios de pena
A History of Mutual Respect
By Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt A meditation on friendship, competition, and carnal desire, cast against
2010, S16mm transfer to HD, 24 Min lush jungle settings and the modernist architecture of Brasilia.
Language: English, Portuguese
Produced by A Mutual Respect Productions
With Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt, Joana Nascimento
https://vimeo.com/74979689
Password: history of mutual respect
Too Many Daddies, Mommies and Babies
By Gabriel Abrantes Two eco-activists abandon their efforts to try to save the Amazon in order
2008, S16mm transfer to HD, 24 Min to start a family, only for tragedy to befall their surrogate in this outrageous,
Language: Portuguese Warholian take on the weepie.
Produced by Gabriel Abrantes
With Ana Moreira, Filipe Vargas, Alexandre David, Agatha Pinho
https://vimeo.com/75015079
Password: too many daddies
Visionary Iraq
By Gabriel Abrantes and Benjamin Crotty
2006, S16mm transfer to HD, 17 Min
Language: English
Produced by Gabriel Abrantes
With Gabriel Abrantes, Benjamin Crotty
https://vimeo.com/74361576
Password: visionary iraq
Channeling the Kuchar brothers, Gabriel Abrantes and Benjamin Crotty
play all the roles within a Portuguese family whose incestuous children—a
son with Justin Bieber’s hair (Crotty) and an adopted Angolan daughter
(Abrantes)—have joined the army and are soon to ship out for a tour of
Iraq.
Olympia I & II
By Gabriel Abrantes and Katie Widloski
2006, 16mm transfer to HD, 8 Min
Language: English
Produced by Gabriel Abrantes
With Gabriel Abrantes, Katie Widloski
https://vimeo.com/72301770
Password: olympia
This radical diptych recasts Manet’s canonical painting as a scandalous
psychodrama: in the first part, a prostitute (Katie Widloski) and her
brother (Gabriel Abrantes) struggle with their incestuous urges; in the
second, a prostitute (Abrantes) copes with her loneliness on a slow night
for business.
Dear God Please Save Me
By Gabriel Abrantes An archaeologist burries her prized posetions and commits suicide.
2006, 16mm transfer to HD, 3 Min
Language: English
Produced by Gabriel Abrantes
With Katherine Kerr

https://vimeo.com/151092631
Password: deargodpleasesaveme
Razor Thin Definition of Punk
By Gabriel Abrantes Two hipsters bicker about what year punk really died.
2006, 16mm transfer to HD, 4 Min
Language: English
Produced by Gabriel Abrantes
With Katie Widloski, Alexander Carver

https://vimeo.com/151092632
Password: razorthindefinitionofpunk
Anarchist King
By Gabriel Abrantes A silent film about two kids living on the edge of New York.
2006, 16mm transfer to HD, 16 Min
Language: English
Produced by Gabriel Abrantes
With Eric Ringold, Edgar Pedroza
https://vimeo.com/151207434
Password: anarchistking
GABRIEL ABRANTES
Selected Press
ArtForum
32nd São Paulo Bienal
Kevin McGarry
Cinemascope
In the Age of Contamination: Gabriel Abrantes’ Tall Tales and Tainted Love
Andrea Picard
IN THE AGE OF
CONTAMINATION:
GABRIEL ABRANTES’ TALL
TALES AND TAINTED LOVE
bY AndréA picArd
cineMA scope cs53
“Language just, I don’t know,
confuses things. Crazy.”— Cookie,
in The History of Mutual Respect
DiSarmingLy direct, it’s
gaze that will forever symbolize the
tantalizing transition into modernity,
as if a single woman harboured the
power to dismantle centuries’ worth of
objectification, prescribed Victorian
codes of conduct, and the dominion of
man. That stoic and somewhat sullen
gaze belongs to the languid, self-satisfied
odalisque in Olympia, manet’s landmark
1863 portrait of model-painter Victorine
meurent—a work so written about,
referenced, deconstructed, reproduced,
Olympia I & II, 2006, by gabriel Abrantes and Katie widloski
and kitschified that it’s well nigh contemporaneity. John Berger’s assistance
impossible to fathom the scandalous effect is hardly required to remind us that the
it aroused at the Salon de Paris a couple web of the gaze is a complex ricochet,
years after it was painted. But, of course, from Victorine’s, manet’s, yours, and mine.
times have also changed tremendously: not to mention the freaky cat’s. Olympia’s
blatant, confrontational, and highly eternal allure, at least partially, stems
sexualized encounters run rampant via from its collision of myth and reality, of
every possible channel of communication historical precedent and a moment in
as the vaunted self seeks to compete in a time so completely embodied in the fleshy
restless, shamelessly ambitious, and keenly brushstrokes that the work proposes a
underdressed world. and yet the painting’s seemingly accessible truth; at the very
power persists; its tremulous sensuality least, it signals an attempt to scrape away
a barely conceals the vulnerability of its placid decorum. (ingres’ contorted nudes,
subjects—both courtesan and servant, as on the other hand, make no such claims for
well as that of the painter. Even the cat is convenience, their neoclassical abstraction
frightened. The brazen acts of looking and a pretense for perverse medievalism and
being looked at are ultimately secretive eroticized “Orientalized” superiority; their
and speculative ones, suppressing fear and source of disquiet is an altogether different
fantasy, seductive satisfaction and sadness. matter.) There’s something profoundly
Baudelairian in manet’s painting,
That desire is entangled in power is eternalized as a profanation indicative of
nothing new, nor would it have been modern life, which was at last revealed
150 years ago when manet ironically to be immoral, vulgar, transgressive. and
substituted symbolism for naturalism and, it still is, although true transgression is
in so doing, created a prescient coup of harder to come by these days.
With Olympia’s storied opprobrious
reception having long since morphed
into masterpiece-worship, it comes as
little surprise that US-born, Lisbon-based
artist-filmmaker gabriel abrantes, known
for an increasing number of bold, often
mesmerizing, and appropriately divisive
works about sexual desire, the effects of
historico-socio-political power swings,
and globalized psychogeography, used
manet’s painting as the subject of one of
his earliest films. as is the case with many
of abrantes’ projects—his is largely an art
of collaboration with a remarkable binding
sense of authorial cohesion—Olympia i &
ii (2006) was made with a co-conspirator.
Co-written, co-directed, and co-starring
Katie Widloski while both were at Cooper
Union, Olympia i & ii is a lushly textured
16mm diptych which first depicts a
cherubic, nubile Widloski as the reclined
Olympia, her porcelain skin aglow with
blushing cheeks and perky attributes (her
features, especially her round face, are more
ingres than manet). in part ii, it’s abrantes
himself as an effeminate Caravaggesque
transvestite expressing, in a mock
Southern drawl, a deeply felt malaise and
a need for consolation. The same brocaded
mise en scène is used for both halves, a flat
but sufficiently luxurious-looking space
cropped into a tight composition creating
a hermetically sealed world. Both tableaux
are theatrical, awkwardly self-conscious,
and equal parts seductive and absurd: the
film playfully disabuses the sanctity of the
original while simultaneously rendering
homage to its disconcerting complexity,
significantly upping the ante with incest,
gender blurring, and politically incorrect
blackface.
in Olympia i, the courtesan’s brother
Duncan (nasally voiced by an offscreen
abrantes) has come to ravish her, as the
camera explores a series of angles through
close-up, beginning with her satin slipper;
a glimpse of her servant appears for a
split second as “black” hands deposit the
requisite bouquet of flowers at Olympia’s
side. While the camera pans her nude body
in and out of focus to soft melodic pop,
the banter between siblings is lewd and
confrontational (lots of “fuck,” “fuck you,”
“you want to fuck me”), with Olympia
maintaining the upper hand with her
calm, hushed, gravelly retorts. Olympia
ii is in a gentler key, with tinkling piano
playing in the background as a needy
male Olympia done up in female make-
up is reassured by the amourous embraces
of his servant, whose thick, impastoed
blackface rubs off all over him. There’s
no cat this time, but Coca-Cola is served
on a silver platter. it’s wholly anarchic
and performative, a sort of down-tempo
Jack Smith two-person show bolstered
by seductive images and dancing film
grain, and a certain chutzpah that can be
interpreted in a number of ways: referring
to the aesthetic scandal that was born with
the first public showing of manet’s painting
and subverting its strict hieratic racial and
sexual dynamics; an attempt at libertine
excess and a paradoxical concoction
of beauty-vulgarity-immorality; not to
Ennui Ennui, 2013, by gabriel Abrantes
mention a comment on the institution
of art itself—how it anoints and judges,
though hypocritically craves scandal and
depravity. There’s an art-school veneer and
naïveté to the whole thing, intentional or
not, that further cements the point and
ironically transcends what could have
been cheap irony by irrevocably mirroring
manet’s symbol-making attempt to avoid
symbolism.
also situated in an artificial enclosed
space and writhing with arch melodrama
is abrantes’ follow-up, Visionary iraq
(2008), co-directed by Benjamin Crotty,
with whom abrantes later made Liberdade
(2011). The two films couldn’t be more
different in design and approach, the
former more in line with abrantes’ tightly
cloistered, performative works (such as
2009’s Too many Daddies, mommies
and Babies), the latter from his “later”
period, characterized by a globetrotting
impulse and expansive, breathtaking vistas
rendered via supremely cinematic creative
geography. it may seem outlandish to
mark a mere three years as the divide
between “early” and “late” works, but such
is the fecundity and scope of the 28-year-
old’s condensed output. irreverently
tackling topics from art history, the war
in iraq (Visionary iraq), global warming
(Too many Daddies…), incest, gender,
and racial blurring (nearly everything!),
colonial and post-colonial exploits (The
History of mutual respect [2010], co-
directed with Daniel Schmidt), fascism
and the inquisition in Portugal (Palácios
Cinemascope
In the Age of Contamination: Gabriel Abrantes’ Tall Tales and Tainted Love
Andrea Picard
Taprobana, 2014, by gabriel Abrantes
de Pena [2011], also co-directed by
Schmidt), mass migration (Liberdade),
and reviving texts from Shakespeare
(Fratelli [2011], co-directed by alexandre
melo) and aristophanes (Ὄρνιθες, a.k.a.
Zwazo, 2012) and subjecting them to
an inventive and idiosyncratic trans-
cultural exhumation, abrantes displays a
fervent restlessness. nor does he have any
cinematic limitations, with a penchant
for genre subterfuge (Baby Back Costa
rica [2011] is an over-sexed take on
the thriller, accompanied by crunchy
bass) and a style that distinctly shuttles
between a jerky (and somewhat quirky)
amateurism and a stately Super 16mm
grandeur, evoking, twisting, and turning
Hollywood’s conventions into beguiling
and breathtaking devices.
in blatant ways, the work attests to the
cultural divide that defines abrantes’
identity: american, with enough cultural
theory to buttress his critiques of US
imperialism and Hollywood’s hegemonic
power over the collective consciousness,
and Portuguese, with one eye on the
country’s dual-edged colonial past and
political oppression, and the other on its
changing relationships in a post-colonial,
globalized world. This multiplicity of
identities, and ongoing trans-cultural
experience, has quickly become a defining
feature of contemporary life in general
and a hallmark of the artist’s work. Just
as manet’s Olympia wrestled with the
weight of inheritance and affiliation as it
chose to delve into the disconcerting state
of its own presence, abrantes’ work is
undeniably, even disarmingly, of its time
and generation—one in which the question
of sanctity itself is either not posed or is
held up to self-righteous suspicion. This
doesn’t preclude an atavistic probing; not
unlike Pasolini’s “primitivism,” abrantes’
films partake in a complex and seemingly
contradictory moral vision that has
become increasingly cloaked in a form of
mannered realism. The term baroque is
over-invoked these days, but nevertheless
its ethos of contorted, contaminated
splendour certainly finds resonance in
many of abrantes’ indelible images.
Visionary iraq collapses the
aforementioned dual identity with
protagonists who look and sound
american but are supposed to be in
Portugul. The film’s many male and female
characters are all played by abrantes and
Crotty, even the adopted angolan sister
(incarnated by a flat-chested, messy-
wigged abrantes). While abrantes’
androgyny is believable enough, his/her
being african defies any pretence of realism
and his glistening face looks like it was
smeared with chocolate sauce (one thinks
ahead to the protagonists’ colonizing and
exoticizing “warm chocolaty thoughts”
in The History of mutual respect). The
depiction is crude and ridiculous, in
keeping with the makeshift mise en scène
and stylized acting. There’s no veiling of
the film’s many-layered artifice, especially
its Warholian spaces, which alternate
from a Chelsea girls carmine-coloured
enclosure to an aluminum-foiled gallery
space, to a battlefield that, on a dime,
transitions into a discotheque with an
euphoric light show. an overblown
family melodrama depicting incestuous
siblings miguel and ginja, who depart
for Operation iraqi Freedom while their
father is surreptitiously profiting from
the war, Visionary iraq has a pronounced
underground, Kucharesque feel to it.
But nestled within one of its numerous
russian dolls lies a story of impotence:
miguel can’t get it up.
This same theme is revisited in
Liberdade, which opens with shaky, Super
16 handheld shots of a young man robbing
a local Luandan pharmacy of its supply
of Viagra. His sexual impotence is later
revealed to be the result of debilitating
stress from the social divide separating
him from his Chinese girlfriend, whereas
miguel’s flaccidness, which could
understandably be born from pre-war
jitters (and not presumably from the guilt
of fucking his sister!), registers instead
as a profound and narcissistic inability
to fully grasp the moral implications
of his circumstances. an existential
nausea suffuses both films, though their
worlds could not be geographically and
conceptually further apart. The tawdry
campiness of Visionary iraq is replaced
in Liberdade by sweeping establishing
helicopter shots, and the stroboscopic arty
music video-like sequence in the former is
substituted in the latter with a Hollywood-
style musical interlude, with “Diamonds
on the Soles of Her Shoes” commenting
on the class collision between the two
young lovers. The tone strangely feels as
sincere as it does ironic, couched as it is
within the mechanisms of a cinema that is
being critiqued and wonderfully usurped.
Liberdade is in a constant state of formal
mise en abyme, not unlike Visionary iraq
but on a grander, and yet less self-conscious
scale. it’s conceivable that some viewers
may fail to appreciate the varying levels
at which the film operates: it’s gorgeously
shot, with beautiful protagonists, stunning
compositions, and enough of a linear
structure and storyline to be taken at face
value (including a karaoke scene). in other
words, it’s an impressive short film by two
talented artists, regardless of whether or
not one grasps the meta-melodrama and
mischievous metonyms that abound and
make it all the more remarkable.
in a recent interview with Cahiers du
Cinéma, abrantes suggested that the art
crowd might be better disposed to the
inner workings of some of his films. While
i’m not entirely convinced that this is the
case (especially as i fail to see how his
sumptuous cinema would be served by
the conditions of the gallery), there is an
undeniable rancièrian dialectic that runs
through many of the works with their
bifurcating theoretical schemes hewing
to a certain au courant critical proclivity.
aesthetics (beauty, most specifically)
and politics (of identity, i.e., race, gender,
sexuality, nationality) are the twin poles
upon which abrantes’ characters are
precariously perched. Poised between
them are decadence and decay, ancient
ruins, unconscious traumas, opulent,
awesome settings (both natural and man-
made, utopian and fascist) and a perverse
and persistent sense of destabilization
often caused by nascent, barely contained,
and largely pubescent carnal desire. But
unlike contemporary artists like ryan
Trecartin and ryan mcginley whose
work participates in and actively evokes
the hyper-sexualized and resolutely
contemporary profanations of an extremely
localized youth culture, abrantes and
his collaborators are more interested
in addressing their own authorship or
artmaking through historical, peripatetic,
polyglot, and even folkloric investigations
that comment on the complexities of
today’s globalized world, no matter how
silly and reckless those quests may seem.
abrantes and co. also incarnate a range of
characters themselves, collapsing notions
of narcissism and exhibitionism with
camp and curiosity, and making the most
of a limited budget.
Detractors contend that abrantes’
politics are either facile or cynical and
offensive. While the films sometimes
adhere to simplistically categorical visual
metaphors and put forth ideas that don’t
necessarily yield answers, resolution,
or even profound consideration, they
nevertheless delve into touchy terrain
with mesmeric fervour, unabashed
romanticism, imagination, and gleeful
impropriety. Drawn to the popular side
of industrial cinema and its vaudeville
origins, abrantes’ films are seductive
(often shot on Kodak S16mm, on an Éclair
aCL), deceptively simple and brash as
they transgress certain arbiters of taste in
order to proceed to cautionary tales that
ordinarily stipulate seriousness, drawing
inspiration from the likes of Carmelo Bene
and Pasolini’s transgressive morality plays.
Has anyone seen Terrence malick’s The
new World (2005) lately? The History of
mutual respect makes clear the inherent
power trips of anthropological quests,
doing so with twisted humour and wit
which are far less offensive than malick’s
violin-soaring, pantheistic epic, adding
to the mix abrantes’ personal interest
in the complex and ever-burgeoning
dynamic between Brazil and Portugal,
as the former colonizer veers toward
economic dependency and collapse while
Brazil enjoys an unprecedented global
ascendency. Shot in Portugal, Brazil (those
jaw-dropping Brasilia compositions),
and argentina, The History of mutual
respect is ridiculously ambitious and
excessive, as spellbinding as it is silly with
mesmerizing waterfalls, a nina Simone
sound bite, and a naked abrantes chasing
his native nubile object of desire in slow
motion through a lush rainforest. The
colonizing protagonists’ search for a clean
and pure sex (spoken in a sequence which
bears a striking visual resemblance to the
rickety chariot scene in Straub-Huillet’s
De la nuée à la résistance [1979]) ends
with casual deceit conveyed through an
SmS, and the transplanted brown beauty
reclined on a rococo sofa in an exquisite
Lisbon apartment, assuming Olympia’s
haughty pose as grandma (abrantes’ real-
life grandmother) purses her lips sipping
espresso and examining the girl’s soft and
supple skin. indeed, a new world.
abrantes’ most elaborate and ambitious
film to date remains his and Schmidt’s
59-minute Palácios de Pena, a fabulist
tale of guilt, girls, and a grandma that
oneirically explores ideas of culturally
inherited culpability and oppression
through a dialectic of desire, and includes
a surfeit of ideas and unforgettable
images: the two stunning moorish
lovers condemned to death for their
homosexuality (played by two Lisbon-
based Brazilian hustlers), a dog-headed
doctor, a lovely lesbian lawyer, vertiginous
vistas and a concluding conflagration.
yet the more recent Fratelli and Ὄρνιθες
should not be overlooked within abrantes’
steadily growing filmography. Fratelli,
which begins with a disorienting shot
inside of the Pantheon’s coffered dome,
stars Portuguese heartthrob Carlotto
Cotto (Tabu), shirtless and sporting a
flimsy leotard and cavorting in sun-soaked
Lazio in a very gay pastoral retelling of
Shakespeare’s prologue to The Taming of
the Shrew. The film makes use of some
of the original costumes from Pasolini’s
Canterbury Tales (1972) and recalls the
wonderful anachronisms of rohmer’s
still-underrated Les amours d’astrée et de
Céladon (2007) as it delights in anarchic
pageantry and textual conflation, quoting
as much as it creates. Shot in italy, the
dialogue is in Portuguese, spoken with the
Brazilian accent from Bahia.
Ὄρνιθες, abrantes’ most recent film,
was shot in Jakmel, Haiti, with dialogues
in Haitian Creole and attic greek. in
some ways a fulcrum for his thinking
about cross-cultural traversals and shifts
and gaps in meaning, Ὄρνιθες begins
with a loosely quoted folk-myth from
The arabian nights recounted in Haitian
Creole as the two older men who form
the film’s bookend introduce the first of
several idioms, each of which harbours
its own symbolic and historical meaning.
Sam rohdie’s line about Pasolini’s “Trilogy
of Life” being a prime example of “one
language citing another” comes to mind as
abrantes mounts a spectacular theatrical
adaptation of aristophanes’ 414 BC play
The Birds with elaborate and colourful
costumes fabricated by local artisans who
mostly produce their work for the annual
carnival (though also try to sell them to
tourists whenever possible). The film as a
whole hints at the dramatic structure of a
typical aristophanes play with prologue,
parodos, symmetrical scenes and song,
forming a multi-structured narrative
device that questions culture’s role in
dealing with historical trauma via rippling
layers, under the watchful presence of a
vulture and an eagle who form the abstract
silent greek chorus. abrantes is well aware
that his film cannot concretely bridge
gaps in knowledge, and doesn’t purport
to be making grand statements about
repression, the slave trade, and the birth of
Western democracy. yet the unseen theatre
director, whose astonishing desire to
mount a play in original attic greek with
locals, stands as a flamboyant metaphor
for abrantes’ dizzying artistic feats, which
form a strange, singular language of their
own.
 Sight & Sound
Transcultural Express
Nick Pinkerton EXPRESS’
‘TRANSCULTURAL
publicado por Nick Pinkerton em Sight & Sound
em Fevereiro de 2016
OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
Wide Angle
PROFILE
TRANSCULTURAL EXPRESS
Beneath their gorgeous surfaces,
the films of Gabriel Abrantes are
knife-sharp, very funny satires
of 21st-century privilege
By Nick Pinkerton
Privilege is the elephant in the room of
contemporary cinema. While there has been
much discussion in recent years of the yawning
gaps in representation and opportunity between
races and genders, class – a less visible marker
– has attracted less comment, even in the
supposedly more diverse experimental/art film
world. Movie-making is like polo – anyone can
learn to play in theory, but cash certainly helps
your chances of winding up on the grounds.
I can only guess the class background of
the young American-born, Europe-based
filmmaker Gabriel Abrantes, and my guess
would be that he doesn’t come from dire
poverty. But from the beginning of a career of
frenetic productivity, Abrantes has interrogated
the concept of privilege, cross-examined the
privileged perspective and made it the prevailing
subject of his fast-growing filmography. His
bewitching movies deal in the imbalance
hardwired into desire across lines of class
To the Manet born: Gabriel Abrantes, aristocrat in a gilded cage, in Olympia I & II (2006) – ‘quintessential exhibitionistic art school piss-taking’
56 | Sight&Sound | March 2016
and culture and, as Gang of Four put it, “The
problem of leisure / What to do for pleasure.”
Let’s begin with Olympia I & II, a piece of
deceptively sophisticated juvenilia. This diptych,
co-directed by and co-starring Katie Widloski
and finished in 2006, was produced when both
Abrantes and Widloski were studying at Cooper
Union college in Manhattan. Over nine and a
half minutes the co-directors take turns posing
reclined in the buff, in the attitude of Manet’s
Olympia. In the first half, a fey off-camera voice
(Abrantes) abuses his big sister (Widloski), who
has apparently run away from the family home
to work as a courtesan (“Olympia,” he harangues,
“men want to taste the exotic”). In the second, a
primped and powdered Abrantes, tended to by a
fawning ‘mammy’ in shiny greasepaint blackface
(Widloski), strikes the same pose, bemoaning
life in the gilded cage. “This way of life, these
fine things,” he whinges, “it isn’t what I’d hoped
for” – well before the dawn of Twitter, Abrantes
has fixed his focus on #FirstWorldProblems.
Olympia I & II is quintessential exhibitionistic
art school piss-taking – and evidence that
Abrantes’s preoccupations and aesthetic
preferences were set in place early. The blanched,
affectless, halting line readings would become a
feature of his films, as would the poor-little-rich-
boy-or-girl histrionics, the idea of inheritance
as a scourge to be avoided (in vain, always),
the exoticisation of the unknowable other,
and the relationship between the affluenza-
stricken West and the developing world.
Olympia I & II screened at the Film Society
of Lincoln Center in early February as part of
a week-long programme, Friends with Benefits,
billed as ‘An Anthology of Four New American
Filmmakers’ – a ‘career’ retrospective of the just-
past-30 Abrantes along with works by Daniel
Schmidt, Alexander Carver and Benjamin
Crotty. They constitute a loose confederation
of like-minded artists, with the most visible
bonding agent the promiscuous, omnipresent
Abrantes, who has co-directed films with both
Crotty (Visionary Iraq, 2008; Liberdade, 2011)
and Schmidt (A History of Mutual Respect , 2010;
Palácios de Pena, 2011). They share a devotion to
analogue film – almost all the work shown was
shot on super 16 – a tendency to collide high and
low production values, limpid, non-professional
performances and location shooting in far-flung
ports of call. (The attraction to throwback tech
extends to a fondness for retro synths on the
soundtracks.) They also eschew conventional
feature runtimes: Crotty’s Fort Buchanan (2014),
whose theatrical release is the ostensible occasion
for the programme, is a slim 65 minutes, most
of Abrantes’s shorts a fraction of that. (This may
prompt accusations of dilettantism, but many of
today’s most interesting young filmmakers are
throwing off the yoke of arbitrary feature length.)
Abrantes’s Olympia I & II, Visionary Iraq (2009),
and Too Many Daddies, Mommies and Babies (2009)
belong to a distinct early period: taking place in
stylised worlds created in studios, they were made
before his ambitions, budgets or international
fund-raising know-how allowed him to operate
on a grander scale. The enclosed settings don’t
mean these films lack global ambition: in
Visionary Iraq, Abrantes and Crotty (classmates at
the Le Fresnoy art school in Tourcoing, France),
the lone performers, take on multiple roles,
including a brother and adopted Angolan sister
who are introduced enjoying a last night of incest
before their deployment to Iraq. Too Many Daddies,
Mommies and Babies concerns a gay couple who
doom the planet when they give up their global
warming research to start a family, siring a baby
with a poor Portuguese surrogate mother who
dies in labour, unmourned and unknown.
The theme of the poor being used as breeding
stock for their social betters also appears in A
History of Mutual Respect, a pivotal work which
furnished the name for Abrantes’s production
company, Mutual Respect; gave him his first high-
profile festival win, at Locarno; and established
the template for his work to date: opulent,
deadpan, globe-trotting, culture-clash sicko
comedy. Abrantes and Schmidt play vacationing
first-worlders in Brasilia, about to plunge into
the Amazon basin on a mission to taste the
exotic – as Schmidt’s character, Cookie, puts it: “I
just want to sleep with a native woman without
getting some ungodly disease.” He seemingly
fulfils his search for self-oblivion through “clean,
true pussy” and “simple, direct, and unmolested”
love, and decides to remain happily ever after
in the jungle, only to discover via text message
that his “bro” has transported the dusky girl to
a manorial home in Portugal where she will
carry future bearers of the family name.
‘Mutual respect’, for Abrantes, is inextricable
from mutual incomprehension, and transcultural
confusion is the common element to the
startlingly eclectic films that follow. Liberdade,
a story of star-crossed lovers, begins in medias
res, as an Angolan boy (Wilson Teixeira) holds
up a neighbourhood pharmacy for its Viagra
supply. Pursued by the police, he is cornered
on the rooftop of a shabby apartment building
in Luanda, caressing the hair of his Chinese
girlfriend (Betty Meixue). As the sun drops above
the Atlantic and police helicopters circle, the
soundtrack is overwhelmed by the beginning
of ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ from
Paul Simon’s Graceland album, whose history as
a ‘problematic’ work of cultural appropriation
is no coincidence. From here we flash back to an
abridged history of their affair, tender, wistful
– and unconsummated, because the poor boy
from the slums can’t get it up for his rich girl.
The film concludes with heartbreaking images
of youths swimming in an offshore graveyard
for retired freighters – while working with a
variety of DPs, Abrantes has retained a uniformly
ravishing visual style. In Fratelli (2011), a pastoral
Renaissance period piece co-directed with
Alexandre Melo, a mincing aristocrat and his
Edith Scob in Ennui Ennui (2013)
gym-buff, bulging-codpiece retainers come across
a peasant unconscious from drink in a meadow;
the aristocrat proposes a plan to convince the
boy on waking that he is a nobleman emerging
from a coma, parading before him sexual
opportunities and art treasures, including
Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a precursor of Olympia.
Abrantes is reportedly at work on two feature-
length works: The Hunchback, a collaboration with
Ben Rivers, and another film with Schmidt; but
the 58-minute Palácios de Pena (2011) is his longest
work to date. Highlit by an ecstatic, voluptuous
nightclub outing and a comedown car-ride set to
a chopped-and-screwed version of Alphaville’s
‘Forever Young’, the film follows a struggle
between two adolescent female cousins vying to
inherit their grandmother’s fortune. Abrantes’s
own grandmother, Alcina, who also appears
as the matriarch in A History of Mutual Respect,
plays that role – a little self-indicting personal
touch, perhaps. In the Haiti-shot Ornithes (Birds,
2012) Abrantes is explicitly the target of his own
satire. The film revolves around a production
of Aristophanes’s comedy in the coastal city of
Jacmel, performed by a rara carnival troupe and
directed by ‘Little Gabriel Abrantes’, according
to the bullhorn ballyhoo of the pick-up truck
we see canvassing the countryside. Abrantes
favours nesting structures: here Aristophanes’s
story of men seeking to infiltrate the company
of birds is framed by the story of an interloping
artist awkwardly trying to ingratiate himself
to a foreign environment; the local girls care
Taken together, a portrait
emerges from Abrantes’s films
of a glutton for beauty with a
knotty moral and political vision
Visionary Iraq (2008)
only for Twilight movies, while his Haitian star
grumbles about his director’s “shitty theory”: “[He]
thinks we can still have a Dionysian collective
trance induced by polyphonic hexameters…”
Abrantes has sole director credit on Birds, as
on the recent Ennui Ennui (2013) and Taprobana
(2014), two films that with their polished CG
work and lush, alien landscapes feel like pocket-
sized transgressive blockbusters. Ennui Ennui,
like Visionary Iraq, imagines contemporary
geopolitics as a network of smothering parent-
child relationships – a husky Afghan teenager’s
tiger mother pressures him to kidnap and rape
a princess (Esther Garrel) living alone with her
over-familiar father, though he accidentally nabs
a French Libraries Without Borders volunteer
away from her haute-couture-clad diplomat
mother (Edith Scob); all this is observed by a
military drone named Hellfire Destroyer #503027,
reporting to her “Daddy”, Barack Obama.
While this film deals in very contemporary
East-West transactions, Taprobana looks back
to an earlier colonial era, depicting episodes
from the life and afterlife of the 16th-century
Portuguese poet Luís Vaz de Camões, author of
the epic Os Lusíadas. Abrantes gives us Philip
II as a lisping queen of a piece with Fratelli’s
aristocrat, and de Camões, the national hero, as
a cranky hop-head who practises coprophagy
with his Chinese lover Dinamene (Jani Zhao),
abandons her drowned corpse to chase darting
nymphs, and finally finds himself barred from
Poet’s Heaven. (De Camões is played by Natxo
Checa, credited as producer and cameraman
on a number of Abrantes’s films, and a quietly
essential partner in his creative endeavour.)
Abrantes has developed a unique combination
of schoolyard low comedy and highbrow
sources – The Taming of the Shrew in Fratelli,
Aristophanes in Birds, de Camões here. His
films revel in collisions, in class clashes, cultural
confusion and polyglot babble, with dialogue in
Brazilian and Iberian Portuguese, English, Attic
Greek, Haitian Creole, Spanish, French, Chinese,
Sinhalese, and probably a few others. Any one of
his movies might be written off as the work of a
know-somethingish smart-ass aesthete, but taken
together a portrait emerges of a glutton for beauty
with a knotty moral and political vision. We
pretend to admire art that puts sacred cows to the
knife, though the unspoken rule is that the sacred
cows in question shouldn’t be those worshipped
by anyone in the inscribed audience. And while
there’s no telling what Gabriel Abrantes will do
next, he most definitely has his knives out.
Liberdade (2011)
March 2016 | Sight&Sound | 57
Gabriel Abrantes

195 Powers Street, FL.2

11211 Brooklyn, Ny
gabrielmiragodinhoabrantes@gmail.com | www.vimeo.com/gabrielabrantes

Education
Postgraduate Studies, Fine Arts, Le Fresnoy, Studio national d’arts contemporains, Tourcoing, FR, 2007-2008;
Exchange Program, Fine Arts, L’École National des Beaux-Arts, Paris, FR, 2005;
Bachelor Fine Arts, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY, USA, 2002-2006.

Bio
Gabriel Abrantes has regularly shown his work at museums such as the Tate Britain (London), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the MIT List
Visual Arts Center (Boston), Museu Serralves (Porto), and the Kunst-Werke (Berlin). He has had over a dozen individual exhibitions in
museums and galleries and participated in dozens of collective exhibitions. In 2016 he was a commissioned artist of the Bienal de São
Paulo (Brazil) and in 2014 of the Binnal d’Image Mouvement - Centre d’art Contemporain de Geneve (Switzerland).

His videos are regularly screened at film festivals, commercial cinemas and on television. They have been awarded prizes at prestigious
international festivals, such as the Berlinale and the Locarno Film Festival.

He lives and works in New York and Lisbon.

Work

Artist and Filmmaker Work shown at Palais de Tokyo, Mussée d’Art Moderne, MIT List
Visual Arts Center and KunstWerke. Retrospective screenings
at Film Society of Lincoln Center, Bafici. Films premiered at the
Venice Biennale and Berlinale.

Head of Studies and Film Professor | 2014 - 2015 Coordinated the 2nd year at the film department, creating the
HEAD, Haute école d’art et design, Geneva, CH curriculum, teaching theoretical and practical courses, managing
the budget, and inviting visiting artists.

Visiting Professor | 2012 Led a semester long film workshop, guiding each student from
HEAD, Haute école d’art et design, Geneva, CH conception to post-production of a short film.

Film Professor | 2011 Led a three month 16mm film workshop at Cultural Center.
ZDB, Lisbon, PT

Visiting Artist Lecturer | 2006 - Present Gave artist talks at Harvard Film Study Center, MIT List Visual
Arts Center, Fundacion Luis Seone, etc.

Founder and Film Producer | 2010 - Present Produced over a dozen films, gaining experience in financing,
Herma Films / A Mutual Respect Productions, Lisbon, PT production, post-production, sales, distribution and exhibition.
Solo Exhibitions Biennials

2015 2016 32a Bienal de São Paulo, BR

Early Films, Laboratorio de Curadoria, Coimbra, PT 2014 BIM, Centre d’art Contemporain de Geneve, CH

2014
Gabriel Abrantes, Odd Places for Hope, ICA, London, UK
Gabriel Abrantes, Centre D’Art Contemporain, Geneva, CH

2013
Gabriel Abrantes, MIT List Center, Boston, USA Selected Group Exhibitions
Ghosts of Eden, Kunst-Werke, Berlin, DE

2012
Mostra de Filmes de Gabriel Abrantes, ZDB, Lisbon, PT
2010
Histories of Mutual Respect, CCVF, Guimarães, PT
The Little People of Flores 2, Roodkapje, Rotterdam, NL
2009
The Little People of Flores 2, ZAAL5, Film Huis, Hague, NL
Gabriel Abrantes Lumiar Cité Maumaus, Lisbon, PT
20-30 Experiments in Moral Relativism, Galeria 111, Lisbon, PT
2008
Visionary Iraq, com Benjamin Crotty, Galeria 111, Porto, PT
2007
Buttpocalipse, Galeria 111, Lisbon, PT
2016
The Artists’ Cinema - Tate Britain, London, GB
The Weight of a Gesture, Caixa Forum, Barcelona
Selected Affinities, EDP + Fund. Carmona e Costa, Lisbon, PT
Tension and Liberty, CAM - Gulbenkian, Lisbon, PT
2015
Mona - BIM, Hobart Tasmania, AU
Post-Human, Oracular Vernacular - Leclere MDV, Marseille, FR
2014
L’Europe des Artistes, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, NO
12 Contemporâneos, Museu Serralves, Porto, PT
2013
Sob o Signo de Amadeo, CAM - Gulbenkian, Lisbon, PT
O Mar, BES Arte & Finança, Lisbon, PT

2012
O Riso, Fundação EDP, Lisbon, PT
Super-8, Yerba Buena Center for the Art, San Francisco, USA
Super-8, Künstlerhaus, Berlin, DE
Super-8, MAM, Rio de Janeiro, BR

2011
Living on the Edge of a Silver Future, Galerie 5020, Salzburg, AT
K-Acker, Triangle France, Marseille, FR
Super-8, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
Selected, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK

2010
Dynasty, Palais de Tokyo/MAMVP, Paris, FR
20 anos da Sala do Veado, Sala do Veado, Lisbon, PT

Selected Public Collections 2009

Reset, Fondation de l’Entreprise Ricard, Paris, FR
Amalía Coração Independente, Museu Berardo, Lisbon, PT
Museu Serralves, Porto, PT Verbo, Galleria Vermelho, São Paulo, BR
Collécion Inelcom, Madrid, ES Prémio EDP Novos Artistas, Museu da Electricidade, Lisbon, PT
Sesc-Pompeia, São Paulo, BR
CAM - Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, PT 2008
MACE, Elvas, PT New Video Art From Europe, Blow de la Barra, London, UK
Awards
Os Humores Artificiais
2017 Berlinale Intern. Film Festival - EFA Prize (DE)
The Hunchback
2016 IndieLisboa – Best Short Film (PT)
2016 Leuven Short Film Festival - Jury Award
Freud Und Friends
2016 Bucharest IEFF – Special Mention of the Jury (RO)
2016 KISFF – Honorable Mention (LT)
Taprobana
2014 Berlinale Int. Film Festival - EFA Prize (DE)
2012 CPH:DOX LAB Fund (DN) Ennui Ennui
2014 Festival de Cinema de Brive - Grand Prix France (FR)
Nárciso, Édipo, e Orfeu
2012 FIDLAB Grand Prize, FIDMarseille (FR)
Palácios de Pena
2012 Ann Arbour Film Festival - Best Narrative Film (USA)
2012 25FPS, Zagreb - Critics Jury Grand Prize (CR)
2012 Chicago Underground FF - Best Narrative Film (USA)
Liberdade
2011 Locarno Film Festival - Film and Video Prize (CH)
2011 IndieLisboa - Best Portuguese Director (PT)
A History of Mutual Respect
2010 Locarno Film Festival - Best Short Film (CH)
2011 Melbourne IFF - Best Experimental Short Film (AU)
2010 IndieLisboa - Best Portuguese Short Film (PT)
2010 BIEFF - KODAK Cinelabs Prize (RO)
2010 Festival Luso-Brasileiro, SMF - Jury Award (PT)
Fratelli
2011 Curtas Vila do Conde - Honorable Mention (PT)
Olympia I & II
2010 BIEFF - KODAK Cinelabs Prize (RO)
Too Many Daddies, Mommies and Babies
2009 EDP New Artist Award (PT)
Visionary Iraq
2009 IndieLisboa, Young Talent Award (PT)
Retrospective Screening Series
2017 Gabriel Abrantes, BAFICI, Buenos Aires, AR
2017 Gabriel Abrantes, Sicilia Queer Film Festival, Sicily, IT
2016 Friends with Benefits, Lincoln Center, NY, USA
2016 Ciclo Gabriel Abrantes, Cinemaxx, RTP2, TV, PT
2015 Panoramas, VideoBrasil, Sesc-Pompei, São Paulo, BR
2014 Pulsar, CurtoCircuito, Santiago de Compostela, SP
2011 Villa Medicis, Focus Su Gabriel Abrantes Rome, IT
2010 Histories of Mutual Respect, CCVF, Guimarães, PT
2009 Gabriel Abrantes, Entrevues Film Festival, Belfort, FR
Selected Bibliography
“Delay of Death – Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life.” Notebook | Mubi,
December 2012. Web.
Kihm, Christophe, Alexandre Melo, and João Ribas. Abrantes,
Gabriel ed. and i am so thankful for all of the friendships i have
made. Guimaraes, Portugal: Centro Cultural Vila Flor, 2010.
Print.
Art Fairs
2017 SPArte, São Paulo, BR
2015 ArtRio, Prisma, Rio de Janeiro, BR
2011 Roma Art Fair, Special Project, Rome, IT
2011 ARCO, Madrid, Galeria 111, Madrid, SP
2010 ArteLisboa, Galeria 111, Lisbon, PT
2009 ArteLisboa , Galeria 111, Lisbon, PT
2009 Art Cologne, Galeria Blow 111, Cologne, DE
2008 Art Positions, Art Miami Basel, Blow 111, Miami, USA
2008 ArteLisboa, Galeria 111, Lisbon, PT
2007 ArteLisboa, Galeria 111, Lisbon, PT
Filmography and Selected Festival Screenings
Tristes Monroes
by G. Abrantes and D. Schmidt | 2017 | 90 Min | S16mm
In Production
Os Humores Artificiais
by Gabriel Abrantes | 2016 | 29 Min | S16mm
2017 Berlin IFF - Berlinale Shorts Competition (DE)
2016 32ª Bienal de São Paulo (BR)
A Brief History of Princess X
by Gabriel Abrantes | 2016 | 7 min | S16mm
2016 Tate Britain - Artists Cinema
2016 Toronto International Film Festival
2016 New York Film Festival (USA)
2016 Locarno International Film Festival (CH)
2016 Milano Film Festival (IT)
2016 Curtas Vila do Conde - National Competition (PT)
The Hunchback
by G. Abrantes and B. Rivers | 2016 | 29 Min | S16mm
2016 Locarno Film Festival (CH)
2016 IndieLisboa - National Competition (PT)
2016 São Paulo International Short Film Festival (BR)
2016 BFI - London Film Festival (UK)
2016 Torino Film Festival (IT)
2016 Leuven Short Film Festival
Freud Und Friends
by Gabriel Abrantes | 2015 | 24 Min | S16mm
2016 Berlin IFF - Berlinale Shorts Competition (DE)
2016 Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival
2015 IndieLisboa - Special Screening ‘Em Lisboa’ (PT)
Taprobana
by Gabriel Abrantes | 2014 | 24 Min | S16mm
2014 Berlin IFF - Berlinale Shorts Competition (DE)
2014 Curtas Vila do Conde - National Competition (PT)
2014 CPH:DOX (DK)
2014 Com.Release – Pan Pleure Pas Capprici Dis. (FR)
Ennui Ennui
by Gabriel Abrantes | 2013 | 30 Min | HD
2014 Melbourne Internation Film Festival (AU)
2014 Clermont Ferrand International Film Festival (FR)
2013 Rome International Film Festival (IT)
2014 Com. Release – Pan Pleure Pas Capprici Dis. (FR)
Ὄρνιθες
by Gabriel Abrantes | 2012 | 17 Min | S16mm
2012 Rome International Film Festival (IT)
2012 BFI London Film Festival (UK)
2012 Toronto International FF – Wavelengths (CA)
2012 Locarno IFF - Pardi di Domani Competition (CH)
Fratelli
by G. Abrantes and A. Melo | 2012 | 17 Min | S16mm
2012 Hors-Pistes, Film Festival, Centre Pompidou (FR)
2011 Villa Medicis, Focus Su Gabriel Abrantes (IT)
Baby Back Costa Rica
by Gabriel Abrantes | 2011 | 5 Min | S16mm
2012 Worm, Rotterdam (NL)
2011 Curtas Vila do Conde, Stereo (PT)
Liberdade
by G. Abrantes and B. Crotty | 2011 | 17 Min | S16mm
2011 Viennale - Vienna International Film Festival (AT)
2011 BFI London FF - Focus on Gabriel Abrantes (UK)
2011 Locarno IFF - Pardi di Domani Competition (CH)
2014 Com. Release – Pan Pleure Pas Capprici Dis. (FR)
Palácios de Pena
by G. Abrantes and D. Schmidt | 2011 | 58 Min | S16mm
2012 Museum of Moving Images – First Look (USA)
2012 Jeonju International Film Festival (KR)
2012 BAFICI - Buenos Aires FICI (AR)
2011 Viennale - Vienna International Film Festival (AT)
2011 BFI London FF - Focus on Gabriel Abrantes (UK)
2011 Venice Film Festival - Orrizonti Competition (IT)
A History of Mutual Respect
by G. Abrantes and D. Schmidt | 2010 | 24 Min | S16mm
2011 Melbourne International Film Festival
2011 Jeonju International Film Festival, South Korea
2011 Rotterdam IFF - Tiger Competition (NL)
2010 Oslo International Film Festival (NO)
2010 Commercial Release (PT)
Too Many Daddies, Mommies and Babies
by Gabriel Abrantes | 2009 | 24 Min | S16mm
2009 EDP Young Artist Exhibition (PT)
2009 Entrevues Belfort Film Festival (FR)
Visionary Iraq
by G. Abrantes and B. Crotty | 2008 | 17 Min | S16mm
2011 Living on the Edge of a Silver Future Galerie 5020
2009 Rotterdam International Film Festival (NL)
2009 IndieLisboa (PT)
Arabic Hare
by Gabriel Abrantes | 2008 | 7 Min | HD and CG
2008 Panorama 9_10, Le Fresnoy (FR)
Gugg ‘n’ Tate
by Gabriel Abrantes | 2008 | 7 Min | HD and CG
2008 Panorama 9_10, Le Fresnoy (FR)
Obama For President
by G. Abrantes and B. Crotty | 2008 | 2 Min | HD
2010 Histories of Mutual Respect CCVF (PT)
Olympia I & II
by G. Abrantes and K. Widloski | 2006 | 8 Min | 16mm
2010 CAM/ Gulbenkian Permanent Collection (PT)
2009 Cinemateque Française (FR)
2009 Festival IMAGO, MACBA (SP)
Dear God Please Save Me
by Gabriel Abrantes | 2006 | 3 Min | 16mm
2013 Afinidade, MNAC, Lisbon, Portugal
Razor Thin Definition of Punk
by Gabriel Abrantes |2006 | 4 Min | 16mm
Anarchist King
by Gabriel Abrantes | 2006 | 16 Min | 16mm
2010 Histories of Mutual Respect CCVF (PT)