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Sylvania

Bobby Abate

2005 00:10:00 United StatesEnglishB&WStereo4:3Video
Tags:
Animation, Future

Description

The set of Bewitched is a spiritual battleground of overlapping zones — human, alien and cyborg — in Bobby Abate's latest ontological mystery film.

"In Sylvania, we find ourselves in the interiors of the 1960s television series Bewitched, a space like an implanted memory now occupied by spirographic mandalas, a prowling alien (protector or intruder?), a naked woman (asleep or dead?). An unshaven figure who might be the video maker or his double looms like a cyborg in nebulous space. His movements make us wonder if he is an apprentice to the robot-like figure, or the puppet master of the scene, a paradox like the role of television itself — reflective, instructive and/or indoctrinating."

— Mark MacElhatten 

About Bobby Abate

Bobby Abate (Brooklyn, NY) makes films and videos that fuse nostalgia, psychodrama, and spectacle with a distinctly modern resonance. His recent work, the occult themed Love Rose (2010) and Gossip (2011) premiered at the New York Film Festival, and his 1960’s era supernatural drama The Evil Eyes (2011) won \aut\FILM Award for Best LGBT Film at the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival. Other exhibitions and screenings include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Moscow International Film Festival, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Cinematheque, and the ICA in London and Palm Beach. Critics celebrated his underground feature Certain Women, co-directed with Peggy Ahwesh; and MoMA called the film “as sustained and as successful as Todd Haynes’ acclaimed Far From Heaven,” with an “almost opposite approach."

Film Comment Magazine named Bobby one of the top 25 emerging Filmmakers for the 21st Century  Among other accolades, he is also the recipient of the Princess Grace Award. He is currently working on his first mainstream feature Dressed in Black with Damsels in Distress co-producer Charlie Dibe