Director's Works
Gaia Banfi, Ragni Gabrielle Torreborre
French and Australian writer/director based in London.
Gabby founded and ran an English theatre company in Berlin from 2017-2020. During that time, she directed multiple contemporary pieces from Skylight by David Hare to The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard. Her first original play Grenadine was performed in Europe and Australia.
She graduated with a Philosophy MA from the University of St Andrews in 2024. While at uni, Gabby started a freelance videography company Nowhereland Productions and has shot fashion shows, fight nights, live concerts, commercial series and more.
Since moving to London, she has shot for clients like SXSW (London), Royal Court Theatre and Roundhouse. She has directed two music videos and a fashion film on 16mm. Gabby has been featured by Kodak, Shiny List and Promo News, and was recently nominated to the British Young Arrows 25 for Best Unsigned Director and Best Editor. She co-founded her own production company Garo Studios in 2025 and is currently developing her next narrative short film ‘Tussle’ alongside SkyeAngel Productions.
Several years into a romantic relationship, a woman starts to realise that she may be trapped, as she begins to notice spiders all around her house.
'Ragni' explores the fear of being confined to gendered expectations within a heterosexual relationship, and the uneasy duality of motherhood. When the woman realises she is pregnant at the beginning of the video, she starts to become hyper-aware of relationship red flags. Everyday moments start to read as a dark and strange mimetic act of domesticity.
The video moves between this narrative and an imagined space where these dynamics are reversed. In this parallel world, the woman appears in control, commanding the space through movement. This fantasy, however, remains fragile and ultimately collapses into a final nightmare sequence: a vision of being locked into a rigid, 1950s-adjacent version of womanhood.
Spiders operate as a central metaphor, inspired by Louise Bourgeois’ 'Maman; spider sculpture. Though spiders evoke dread and disgust in most, for Bourgeois they represent protectiveness in the context of motherhood. “The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. [...] and very clever. [Spiders] are helpful and protective, just like my mother.” By the end of the video, we see the woman bend over to pick up her child, possibly a daughter, who has now morphed into a spider herself, symbolising the terrifying passing of the torch. She looks at her spider-child with both tenderness and dread.
The film came from many personal conversations I had with female relatives and friends about feeling stuck in relationships where they were expected to fulfil “feminine” labour roles. It’s a feeling that has defined a lot of the ways in which I myself have navigated romantic relationships, and is a fear I wanted to explore on screen.
