Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara (born July 19, 1951) in the Bronx, New York, is an American filmmaker whose gritty, often transgressive cinema has made him a cult figure. Raised in a Catholic Italian‑Irish household, his early exposure to religious iconography and the harsh streets of New York left an indelible mark that surfaces repeatedly in his work. After moving to Peekskill at age eight, Ferrara experimented with Super‑8 at Rockland Community College before honing his craft at SUNY Purchase and the San Francisco Art Institute, where avant‑garde director Rosa von Praunheim encouraged his rebellious streak. In the mid‑1970s he financed his first feature, the explicit pornographic 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, under a pseudonym, a move that foreshadowed his willingness to blur the boundaries between art and exploitation. The low‑budget slasher The Driller Killer (1979) garnered a notorious reputation as a “video nasty” in the United Kingdom and established Ferrara’s reputation for visceral, ultra‑violent storytelling infused with existential dread.\n\nThroughout the 1980s and 1990s Ferrara produced a string of polarising but critically‑admired films, including the revenge thriller Ms .45 (1981), the neon‑lit crime epic King of New York (1990), and the morally ambiguous Bad Lieutenant (1992), which Martin Scorsese praised as one of the decade’s best. His willingness to tackle spiritual themes emerged in The Addiction (1995) and the multi‑plot religious drama Mary (2005), while his later European period saw works such as Pasolini (2014), Tommaso (2019) and Zeros and Ones (2021), the latter earning him the Best Direction award at Locarno. Ferrara’s personal life mirrors his transnational career: after marrying actress Cristina Chiriac he settled in Rome, raising three children—one biological and two adopted—while publicly embracing Buddhism as a practice rather than a religion. Despite controversy and occasional legal battles, his relentless exploration of sin, redemption, and the urban underworld has secured his place as a singular voice in contemporary cinema.