One cannot but share the praises for the "imaginary friends"—filmmakers Gabriel Abrantes, Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty, and Daniel Schmidt—by film critics and sensitive audiences, and all the adjectives are right, from the sumptuousness of imagery to the unpredictability and boldness of their scripts. Discovering and/or returning to the films remains a constant pleasure and an uncommonly thought-provoking experience.Going back to some of the films, and thanks to a certain distance in time and circumstances, I feel something could be said about precisely these particular relationships and the elegant tone created by the friendship's humorous and burlesque qualities.In, for example, Palaces of Pity (2011), Ennui ennui (2013), The Unity of All Things (2013), as in La isla está encantada con ustedes (2015), families, siblings, couples and groups (more than individual "characters") go through adventures where they are all faced with the immensity of the universe, time and space, history and traces,...
- 2/22/2016
- by Marie-Pierre Duhamel
- MUBI
Mubi has partnered with New York's Film Society of Lincoln center to bring online audiences part of their February series, "Friends with Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers," programmed by Dennis Lim and Dan Sullivan. In less than a decade of activity, the four friends and polymorphously promiscuous collaborators Gabriel Abrantes, Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty, and Daniel Schmidt have made some of the most ravishing and least classifiable films in recent memory—and established themselves as a school of filmmaking unlike any other. These uncompromising young visionaries share a penchant for provocation, a taste for transgression, and a host of strategies and obsessions all their own. At once lyrical and perverse, by turns hilarious and delirious, their films obliterate distinctions—between high- and low-brow, between sensual and cerebral, between art cinema and the avant-garde—while remaining sharply attuned to the byproducts of globalization and the fluctuations of post-internet pop culture.
- 2/18/2016
- by Notebook
- MUBI
Taprobana“These poets are so intelligent,” notes King Philip II of Spain toward the end of Gabriel Abrantes’ Taprobana (2014). “They put a sex scene in the end, and I forget I didn’t understand the rest. Such sophisticated engineering.” He’s talking about the Portuguese national epic Os Lusíadas, but he could as well be describing Abrantes’ eclectic body of work. The Lisbon-based filmmaker's steady output of avant-garde shorts holds together a chain of idiosyncratic filmmakers currently being feted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Friends with Benefits" series. Since 2007, Abrantes has matched an affinity for abstruse, looping narrative with a bawdy sense of humor. Although his work frequently draws on sources like Manet or Aristophanes, it’s never hindered by the dictates of good taste. Ribald slapstick abounds, for example, in the Shakespeare-derived frolic Fratelli (2011), which he co-directed with Alexandre Melo. The characters are earthy, their jokes puerile,...
- 2/11/2016
- by Alice Stoehr
- MUBI
The 22nd annual Chicago Underground Film Festival presents five days of devastating celluloid provocations on May 13-17 at the Logan Theatre.
The fest kicks off on May 13 with the incredibly haunting short film Echoes by Jaimz Asmundson and the Filipino romantic crime drama Ruined Heart: Another Lovestory Between a Criminal and a Whore by the single-named director Khavn.
Highlights of the fest include the new slacker-ific comedy by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, L for Leisure; the Spanish socio-political documentary Speculation Nation by Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat; the pastoral friendship drama For the Plasma by Bingham Bryant & Kyle Molzan; and the joyful pop doc Living Stars by Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn.
There are also loads of un-missable short films, such as the gritty modern film noir Bite Radius by Spencer Parsons; and amazing new films by Jennifer Reeder (Blood Below the Skin), Zachary Epcar (Under the Heat Lamp...
The fest kicks off on May 13 with the incredibly haunting short film Echoes by Jaimz Asmundson and the Filipino romantic crime drama Ruined Heart: Another Lovestory Between a Criminal and a Whore by the single-named director Khavn.
Highlights of the fest include the new slacker-ific comedy by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, L for Leisure; the Spanish socio-political documentary Speculation Nation by Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat; the pastoral friendship drama For the Plasma by Bingham Bryant & Kyle Molzan; and the joyful pop doc Living Stars by Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn.
There are also loads of un-missable short films, such as the gritty modern film noir Bite Radius by Spencer Parsons; and amazing new films by Jennifer Reeder (Blood Below the Skin), Zachary Epcar (Under the Heat Lamp...
- 5/11/2015
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
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