Gabriel Abrantes (born 1984 in North Carolina, USA; lives and works in Lisbon) has spent his career exploring filmic expression in film and video as a scriptwriter, director, producer, and actor. Abrantes is known for his handling of historical, political and social themes including post-colonialism, gender, and identity. His novel approach to storytelling, laced with humor and absurdity, adds new twists to myth, legend, historical fact, and social convention. Abrantes is also notable for his ability to deploy elements of popular culture appropriated from Hollywood movie genres such as melodrama, romantic comedy, war and adventure movies, to make works that raise issues in an accessible manner.

This edition of MAM Screen features Les Extraordinaires Mésaventures de la Jeune Fille de Pierre (The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady) (2019), in which a nondescript ornamental sculpture of a girl in the Louvre escapes the museum and confronts the real world on a Paris street corner; Two Sculptures Quarreling in a Hotel Room (2020), derived from this film; Os Humores Artificiais (Artificial Humors) (2016), which deals with the anthropology of humor, portraying love between an indigenous girl and artificial intelligence; and Ornithes (Birds) (2012), which could also be described as a modern restaging of the eponymous Greek comedy by Aristophanes.