Playlist

Riding a Bike Through San Andreas [Podcast]

Bruno Abib on grief, the Lisbon suburbs, and why his short film about police violence needed a San Andreas sequence built from scratch.

I ask Bruno Abib why a short film about police violence in the suburbs of Lisbon needed Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to finish its story.

Death in August (Morte em Agosto, 2023) follows a group of friends after one of them drowns in a lagoon. Some of them take on the police. Pedro stays in his bedroom and plays San Andreas. Bruno grew up on the city's periphery and came to directing through editing, and he tells me why that game meant so much to kids like him in the mid-2000s: next to City of God, it was one of the only places in mainstream media where they could see Black characters and police violence on screen. He shot the film in 2019 and spent almost four years in the edit working out what the game sequence was for. It started as a way to set the virtual against the real. It ended as the only place his character could resolve anything, and he built nearly all of its sound in post.

We talk about the dried-out hill that opens the film, a dystopian cousin of the Windows XP wallpaper, and the opening he cut, with bodies fading out the way they do when you die in GTA, because it blurred the game and the world too early. He describes editing as problem solving that feels a lot like playing, remembers first meeting machinima through music videos on MTV2, and admits his most memorable San Andreas moment is not a mission at all. He still cannot ride a bicycle, so he rode one in the game, at night, over and over.

I tell him about a gardener in GTA IV who glanced up as I landed by parachute and went back to his gardening. He tells me about petting the giraffe in The Last of Us. We close on whether he sees himself in a machinima lineage alongside Total Refusal and the Knit's Island directors, and on his next short, about the years he wanted to be a YouTuber, with a sequence rebuilt through AI and iPhone 3D scans.