Ibai Abad

Ibai Abad is a Catalan writer and director born in Lleida in 1985. He studied at the ESCAC film school and took a degree in Art History at the University of Barcelona. Alongside his studies he made documentaries in Bolivia, Peru and Senegal with the organisation Audiovisuals Sense Fronteres, until 2012.

His early short films, Historia de un entierro and Tahití, won international awards, and La otra vida was shot in 360-degree VR and premiered in the official section of the Sitges Film Festival. In 2012 he founded the production company Mayo Films, which has produced his two feature films and his advertising, video clips and video art. He has also written and directed theatre pieces for the Barcelona company Sognatore.

In 2016 he directed the feature The Girl from the Song, a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth shot in Barcelona, London and at Burning Man in Nevada. Released worldwide on Netflix in November 2017, it placed among the five most-watched films in several countries. His second feature, Escanyapobres, a loose adaptation of Narcis Oller's novel, was filmed in rural Catalonia and Valencia.

His 2026 short The Child of the Sea follows a fish-boy crossing 17th-century Spain to find his mother. It is described as using a hybrid workflow, with Magnific AI acting as a production assistant under human editing guidance to build a stop-motion style world. It was named among the ten finalist shorts at the 2026 Reply AI Film Festival.