Colombian director Gabriel Rojas Vera died yesterday, Sunday, September 4 at the age of 44, of causes not yet made public. He directed the feature film Karen Cries on the Bus / Karen llora en un bus, which had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011, and played in numerous international film festivals including Busan, Cartagena, Rio de Janeiro, and Göteborg.
Born in Bogotá on October 15, 1977, he graduated from the Emmanuel d’Alzon School in 1995 and studied film and television at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, specializing in playwriting and screenwriting, graduating in 2005. He wrote and directed several short films including The Shoe (2002), Look See (2003), and One, Two, Three, Statue! (2003). He worked as scriptwriter at the Centro Superior de Producción Cinematográfica (CSPC) in Guadalajara, Mexico and was the director of the production company Cíclope Films.
Karen Cries on the Bus, which participated at the Works in Progress at the San Sebastián International Film Festival and won the Best First Film Award at the Huelva Film Festival in Spain, tells the story of Karen, who decides to run away after realizing what she has left behind after ten years of living in a golden cage and devoting herself completely to her husband. With her savings she rents a room in downtown Bogotá and tries to get a job, but her age and inexperience make it impossible. Soon she has to decide between returning to a stable life and giving up her new gained freedom or, for the first time, facing cruel life on her own.
