Gabe Klinger (b. 1982, São Paolo, Brazil) won the award for Best Documentary at the Venice Film Festival with his first directorial effort Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater (screened in Sodankylä in 2014). It was an episode of the masterful French TV documentary series Cinema of Our Time (58 episodes between 1989–2020), in which Klinger approached the life and works of his two Texan friends – the avantgarde filmmaker James Benning and the director of the Before trilogy and Boyhood Richard Linklater – with indisputable expertise. Behind the Brazilian-American Klinger, then residing in Chicago, lay a multifaceted cinephile background as a teacher, archivist, curator and writer.
Klinger’s articles have appeared in the world’s leading film publications, such as Sight & Sound, Film Comment and Cinema Scope. He’s taught in the University of Illinois and Columbia College in Chicago and has worked at the George Eastman House photography museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). By 2016, Klinger had accumulated a solid foundation in film theory to move on to his first fiction feature: the result was Porto, a depiction of a sensuous love triangle filmed in Portugal.
Klinger has since relocated back to his birth city in Brazil and directed his second fiction feature Isabel (2026), where São Paolo almost acts as a second lead character. Klinger got his first 8mm camera at age 15 and is a completely self-taught filmmaker: he has little regard for film schools, which he sees as mainly churning out people for professional roles in the film industry. As a film enthusiast, Klinger is a particularly welcome guest at our festival, as he has always championed the use of film and photochemical processes; in the production of both Porto and Isabel, he brilliantly utilized celluloid instead of modern digital formats.
Timo Malmi