Date: 22 October 2011 | Season: London Film Festival 2011 | Tags: London Film Festival
GABRIEL ABRANTES
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Gabriel Abrantes & Benjamin Crotty, Liberdade, Portugal-Angola, 2011, 16 min
Liberdade sketches episodes in the relationship between a domineering Chinese immigrant and her Angolan boyfriend with lavishly cinematic panache. Travelling through spectacular locations in and around Luanda, they navigate the complications of their burgeoning identities and the different cultures they represent.
Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt, Palácios de Pena (Palaces of Pity), Portugal, 2011, 56 min
Gabriel Abrantes and his collaborators use the tropes of mainstream cinema to make works that are by turns comical, thought-provoking and transgressive. In a parable on guilt and oppression, which alludes to aspects of Portuguese colonial history, two cousins are potential heirs to their grandmother’s fortune. A new generation may be oblivious to the past, but inherits it nonetheless.
Gabriel Abrantes & Katie Widloski, Olympia I & II, Portugal-USA, 2008, 7 min
Mimicking the composition of Manet’s notorious painting, the artists play out two possible scenarios: between a prostitute and her gay brother, and between a wealthy transsexual and his devoted maid.
Also Screening: Tuesday 25 October 2011, at 1:15pm, NFT2
PROGRAMME NOTES
GABRIEL ABRANTES
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
LIBERDADE
Gabriel Abrantes & Benjamin Crotty, Portugal-Angola, 2011, video, colour, sound, 16 min
Shot in Luanda and the surrounding area, with non-professional actors, Liberdade is a cross-cultural post-capitalist love story. The film follows two young lovers – an Angolan boy, Liberdade, and his Chinese girlfriend, Betty – as they navigate through the complications of their burgeoning identities. Traveling across the stunning urban and natural landscapes of Angola, from the Chinese karaoke at Shanghai Bahia to the ship graveyard at Santiago beach, Liberdade and Betty struggle to forge the yet uncreated consciousness of their race. (Gabriel Abrantes)
PALÁCIOS DE PENA (PALACES OF PITY)
Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt, Portugal, 2011, video, colour, sound, 56 min
Palácios de pena is about a culturally inherited fear in Portugal, linked to political and social oppression during the Inquisition and Fascism. It revolves around two upper-middle class adolescent Portuguese girls, juxtaposing their budding identities to a trial condemning two Moorish homosexuals to burn at the stake. Their ailing grandmother gives them an awareness of their heritage through the mechanism of desire, describing a dream where she is a judge of the Inquisition. The grandmother’s and the girls’ guilt is complicated by their relationship, that of family and love. As they love each other, so does what they represent: ignorance and the will to violently oppress. (Gabriel Abrantes)
OLYMPIA I & II
Gabriel Abrantes & Katie Widloski, Portugal-USA, 2008, video, colour, sound, 7 min
1. A female professional sex worker is visited by her homosexual adolescent brother and his two dogs. He confronts her about her line of work after having played trivial pursuit with mother on the sun deck. He wouldn’t pay a dime for her disgusting breasts.
2. A transvestite professional sex worker from a middle class Texan family waits for customers while listening to Henry Gorecki and drinking mini Diet Coca-Cola. His maid, the ‘chocolate covered strawberry’, comforts him by rubbing his ‘soft batch’ and they begin making love. (Gabriel Abrantes)
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