That Trash Is Going To Blow Up

Before making films, Antonio Maria Abate wrote. As a teenager, he moderated an online forum devoted to Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto. The site, today one of the most comprehensive repositories of the series on YouTube, gave him an early platform to test a voice that was both analytical and passionate. Writing, Abate recalls in the VRAL interview, was never secondary to watching or playing. Films, games, even books only became complete experiences once interrogated on the page. This habit of reflection quickly hardened into vocation.

In 2008 Abate joined Gamesblog, part of the Blogo network, and five years later was contributing to Cineblog, one of Italy’s major film portals. Between 2008 and 2013 he produced more than a thousand reviews, covered festivals across Europe, and developed a sensibility that treated cinema and videogames as contiguous fields rather than discrete categories. Criticism, however, eventually proved insufficient. Out of curiosity first, and then conviction, he began studying the technical aspects of both games and cinema. In 2013, he received a Filmmaking Certificate Diploma from the London Film Academy and began making short animated and fiction films. He embraced a guerrilla filmmaking style based on limitations and constraints, marked most clearly by That Trash Is Going To Blow Up…