GIANLUCA ABBATE
Film director and video artist

Gianluca Abbate is an artist and director of experimental films based in Roma, born in 1980. In 2016, he won a Nastro d'Argento and in 2015 best short film at the Turin Film Festival. In 2020 he was awarded the Efebo d'Oro for New Languages and the Goethe Film Award at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. His films have been screened at the Ann Arbor festival in the United States, at the MAXXI in Rome, MMOMA - Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Museum of Modern Art in Istanbul, MOCA Hiroshima, Palais de Tokyo and broadcast on ARTE France. He has given lectures at the Civic School of Cinema in Milan, Ied Rome, the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone and currently teaches at the NABA in Rome.

STATEMENT
Personal research and Utopia

All my work is based on a creative process that consists in selecting, cataloging, and arranging materials taken from different sources, such as archive images, videos, drawings, literary texts, poems, sounds, and so on. This research process is transformed into a continuous intuitive elaboration which, through the recomposition of the chosen materials, shows images with unexpected configurations, which give life to new interpretations. This process led me to discover how strong the connections are between body and vegetation, unconscious and roots. Inside each of us, there is a diorama which is the geographical map of our soul.

Panorama and Supermarket are part of a video art project on contemporary society and its related ethical issues. Panorama is the first film in this series and was released in 2014, while Supermarket in 2018. I'm working on the third installment which I hope to finish next year. The project was suggested to me by Rome, the city where I live, which with its stratifications of buildings and ruins is a metaphor for the mind, in which every experience of the past exerts an influence on the present.

The third work will be titled "Utopia, nostalgia for the future" and will be a heavenly and celestial portrait of the future. Here in the center, there will no longer be the city, people, or supermarkets but the giant, central human body, dismembered as shown in anatomy, where large plants will be born from the bowels and fountains will gush out to build mysterious landscapes. On the sides and in the interstices of the composition, there will be the bizarre inhabitants of this place in celebration.

FALLEN HOUSES

2024 / DOCUMENTARY / 15'

LOGLINE
A personal account of the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, told by a father to his son, becomes a universal story for anyone forced to abandon their home. Through their bodies, people carry the memories of once-inhabited places that have now vanished.

SYNOPSIS
What is the connection between the places we inhabit and the walls of our own bodies? And how do we survive among the ruins of both our homes and our souls? Fallen Houses is born from a memory: 1980, the Irpinia earthquake. In a car, a father holds his son tightly in his arms, while buildings crumble outside—it is time to leave. As the story unfolds, the father’s voice becomes polyphonic, intertwining with other stories of displacement: a young man from Mali, defying his father’s wishes, crosses lands and seas in search of a future; a Ukrainian boy, in a new life, searches for his father's face in the strangers he meets. What remains in all this wandering? The lost homes of the past never leave us—those walls now walk with us.

The film is produced by Claudio Esposito of Piranesi Experience and distributed by Cattive Produzioni. I thank them both warmly. Fallen Houses is currently on the international festival circuit.

COS ENDINS

2019
VR / MONO CHANNEL
EXPERIMENTAL 9'
MORE INFO AT WWW.COSENDINS.COM

After so many generational repetitions and beneath so many layers is a territory to be negotiated beyond each person's skin, inside: the cavity that echoes the intimate and singular identity of everyone. The voice that populates this film brings us to various spaces in Matera, from tourist agglomerations to the town's internal spaces (caves, cisterns, lanes, rooms) and the body's own unassailable space: pleasure and desire for other bodies that no one can cancel.

SUPERMARKET

2018
EXPERIMENTAL 8'

A voice says "I would like to make you feel nice and comfortable, and to empty your mind of every single thought..." Thus begins the story, with an invitation to make you fall asleep, in a calm, deep, and peaceful rest, while a chaotic landscape, crowded with people, sets up on the screen. The crowd doesn't seem to have anywhere to go, but they are actually sleeping and they need to dream.

AWARDS:
Best animation/experimental at 22 Faludi Film Festival
Best VR / Experimental Film at Prisma Independent Film Awards
Best Experimental Short Film at Santa Cruz International Film FEstival FECSC

PANORAMA

2014
EXPERIMENTAL 7'

Panorama is the first chapter of a trilogy on the city. The video is a review on a polis that stretches away over an infinite global space with no more uninhabited places nor frontiers where we can take refuge. In this landscape, we cannot see any way of readmission for those who have once been excluded, and this recalls imaginary worlds in search of a balance.

AWARDS:
Best short film at 32° Torino Film Festival
Nastro d'Argento 2016
Videoformes 2015 Award Clermont-Ferrand
Visioni Urbane Award at 21° Visioni Italiane
Genova Film Festival Award – Special Jury Award / Special Mention
Call4Robot Award | Robot Festival Buenos Aires
Fondazione Libero Bizzarri | Andrea Pazienza Prize

MARIO SESTI'S ESSAY DOCUMENTARY
"MONDO SEXY"

Mondo Sexy is an outstanding documentary by critic, journalist, and film director Mario Sesti which explores the world of 1960s erotic documentaries. Mario asked me and Virginia Eleuteri Serpieri to make several sequences for this movie. Mondo Sexy has been presented as a Special Event in the 16th Giornate degli Autori at Venice.

COMMISSIONED WORK
2019-2020

BIOGRAPHY
MAIN EXHIBITION
AND SCREENINGS

Gianluca Abbate is an artist and director of experimental films based in Roma, born in 1980. In 2016, he won a Nastro d'Argento and in 2015 best short film at the Turin Film Festival. In 2020 he was awarded the Efebo d'Oro for New Languages and the Goethe Film Award at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. His films have been screened at the Ann Arbor festival in the United States, at the MAXXI in Rome, MMOMA - Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Museum of Modern Art in Istanbul, MOCA Hiroshima, Palais de Tokyo and broadcast on ARTE France. He has given lectures at the Civic School of Cinema in Milan, Ied Rome, the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone and currently teaches at the NABA in Rome.
He has also won several awards such as:
42° Efebo d'Oro Nuovi Linguaggi, Palermo,
Goethe Film Award at Zebra Film Festival, Berlin | Main prize,
Best Experimental Film at Faludi Film Festival,
Best Experimental film at Prisma Independent Film Awards
Silver Ribbon (Nastro d'Argento) awarded by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists,
Best short film at TFF32 (Torino Film Festival)
Main awards at Videoformes in Clermont-Ferrand (FR),
Best animation short movie at Visioni Italiane in Bologna,
Special mention at Genova Film Festival and more.

His works have been shown at national and international museums and exhibitions, such as:
2019 - MOCA Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art "A window to the world" (JP)
2018 - Macro Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome “Fuorinorma” (IT)
2018 - Torrance Art Museum, “Transitions from Public to PostFuture” Los Angeles (USA)
2016 - Istanbul Museum of Modern Art “Art Speaks Out” (TR)
2015 - Maxxi Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo “Cinema al MAXXI” (IT)
2015 - Palais de Tokyo, “ARTE Video Night And L’OPEN VideoArt” Paris (FR)
2013 - MMoma Moscow Museum of Modern Art “NowAndAfter” (RU).

And at several film and video art festivals:
2020 - Efebo d'Oro Palerno (IT)
2020 - Zebra Poetry Film Festival (DE)
2020 - 27th Chicago Underground Film Festival (USA)
2019 - Ann Arbor Film Festival (USA)
2019 - Visioni Italiane (IT)
2018 - Torino Film Festival (IT)
2018 - Oodaaq Festival (FR)
2018 - Lago Film Festival (IT)
2017 - Strano Film Festival (IT)
2017 - Interference Festival Gdańsk (PL)
2016 - Lucca Film Festival (IT)
2015 - Traverse Vidéo (FR)
2015 - Videoformes (FR)
2015 - Athens Digital Arts Festival (GR)
2015 - Channels Video Art Festival (AUS)
2015 - Visioni Italiane (IT)
2015 - MedFilm Festival (IT)
2015 - Genova Film Festival (IT)
2015 - Lago Film Festival (IT)
2015 - Terra di Cinema (FR)
2015 - roBOt Festival (IT)
2014 - Torino Film Festival (IT)
2002 - Bellaria Film Festival (IT)
And more...

Here is a selection of clients with whom I have worked and continue to work over the years, listed in random order.