Gabriel Abrantes
Directing
Biography
Gabriel Abrantes, born in North Carolina, United States, in 1984. His films have premiered at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs and Semaine de la Critique - Cannes, Berlinale, Locarno Film Festival, the Venice Biennial, and the Toronto International Film Festival.
Born: January 1, 1984
Place of Birth: North Carolina, USA
Known For
Olympia I & II
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.
A Brief History of Princess X
A look back at the history of Brancusi's futuristic golden bronze phallus "Princess X" that is in fact a bust of Napoleon's incredible great-niece, Marie Bonaparte.
Palaces of Pity
Haunted by their own directionless lives, two pre-adolescent girls reunite while visiting their ailing grandmother. In the midst of her fantasies of a medieval past - one consumed by fear and desire - the two girls are transformed and confront a legacy of oppression, juxtaposing their budding identities to a trial condemning two Moorish homosexuals to burn at the stake.
L for Leisure
A dreamy, ironic comedy about a generation of hedonistic students in the 1990s. Their favourite activity: talking endlessly. During a series of vacation days filled with sun-drenched naps, squabbling, waterskiing competitions and love-making, the amateur actors discuss their concerns in dry dialogues. For instance, semi-intellectual reflections on the end of time and how Michael Jordan plays basketball.
Taprobana
In this short comedy, Luis Vaz de Camoes, the greatest Portuguese renaissance poet, struggles creatively while engaging in a hedonistic, coprophagic, and drug addled lifestyle. The film follows the poet, and his lover Dinamene, as he writes his masterpiece, the epic poem "Os Lusiadas." He travels from the cacophony of the Indic jungles, surrounded by allegorical elephants and rhyming macaques, to the frontier of Heaven and Hell, where he is confronted by his fantasy: fame and immortality.
A History of Mutual Respect
When two boys leave for a philosophical journey and only one is prepared for it, their worlds will part forever.
Freud und Friends
A headlong dive into the deepest, silliest recesses of Abrantes’s unconscious.
Here in Lisbon
Welcome to Lisbon: there are mermaids by the Tagus and birds flying over the old city; there are mad scientists and singing fish; lost tourist guides and lost tourists; fado and sad guitars. What a weird city you may think - but no. Lisbon is about being different, sarcastic, welcoming to foreigners even in an economic crisis. Different directors became fascinated by our strangeness. We became fascinated by these directors. The city is never the same in these four episodes, here in Lisbon.
Visionary Iraq
Story about Incest and the Iraq war.
Fratelli
Gabriel Abrantes and Alexander Melo deconstruct the 1st section of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew as a playful, vibrant ode to bacchanalia, classicism and homoeroticism.
Filmography
as Vizinho
as Self (voice)
as (segment "Freud and Friends")
as Portuguese Authority
as Himself
as Duncan; Olympia