Known for his incisive and humorous short films about the oddities of contemporary life, the prolific Portuguese-American filmmaker Gabriel Abrantes’ Os Humores Artificiais stands out as an early exploration of artificial intelligence with more heart and insight than many of the conversations that now characterize the popular discourse on the subject. Mixing Hollywood aesthetics with Wittgensteinian musings, Os Humores Artificiais is emblematic of Abrantes’ unique ability to make down-to-earth films about high-flown ideas.

The film revolves around Andy Coughman, an orb-shaped robot programmed to excel in standup comedy who falls in love with an indigenous girl from the Xingu National Park in Brazil. The ideas in the film stem from Abrantes’ research on humor, perspectivism, and artificial intelligence. According to him, “some people think that the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence is humor.” This, combined with his interest in the Yawalapiti village (where Os Humores Artificiais was filmed) and its community’s “pluralist vision of the universe, where an equal respect is given to ‘non-human’ subjective perspectives,” forms the basis of his investigation into the blurred lines between robot and human, language and love.  

“An A.I. that learned to make good jokes would need to have such a deep understanding of language rules, how to break them and invert them, and a very fine culturally specific sensitivity, that we might as well say they had a ‘human’ understanding of language and culture. ” GABRIEL ABRANTES

As a filmmaker, Abrantes embraces chance and chaos as a way to distance himself from more academic forms of filmmaking. This, combined with his interest in new technologies, is partly what gives his work such an exciting feeling — the other part of the equation being the singular ways in which his imagination and witticisms inform his storytelling. Os Humores Artificiais reflects all of these dimensions, offering a clever treatise on love that treats its human and AI-counterparts on equal terms.  

Gabriel Abrantes was born in North Carolina, United States, in 1989. He received a Bachelor in Fine Arts from Cooper Union and completed his postgraduate studies at Le Fresnoy in France. His feature film debut, Diamantino, which he co-directed with Daniel Schmidt, was the Winner of the Critics’ Week Prize at Cannes in 2018. More recently, Abrantes directed the horror film Amelia’s Children (2023) — available on Hulu — and a VR-sequel to Os Humores Artificiais titled Coughman’s Lament. He is currently working with Schmidt on The Lusitanians, a comedy about a young woman who infiltrates an alt-right militia.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer