Pablos earned his academic degree from the CCC with the short film
La Canción de los Niños Muertos in 2008. For this work, Pablos earned the
Ariel Award for Best Live Action Short and also the
SIGNIS Award during the 4th International Short Film Festival (FICMEX), being the SIGNIS jury's verdict that "the film narrative takes us into the complexity of disparate feelings as violence and tenderness, anger and forgiveness, rebellion and reconciliation." After directing the documentaries
La Escritura en la Pared and
Una Frontera, Todas las Fronteras (2010), Pablos premiered in 2013 his first feature film,
La Vida Después, also starring Azuela, Américo Hollander and María Renée Prudencio. The film, about two brothers searching for their stranged mother, received the Klic Award granted by the Mexican movie theater chain
Cinépolis during the Morelia Film Festival.
La Vida Después was the only Mexican film screened during the
70th Venice International Film Festival and according to Pablos is about "living in the same roof with a complete stranger, although that is your family... it has to do with the lack of communication". About the thematic similarities between his first short film and his first feature film, Pablos stated to magazine
Encuadres:"I knew that I was interested in keep talking about family, namely, about brotherhood, but in the process I discovered what was the true essence of this film [
La Vida Después], which is about family heritage emotionally more than physically and how your children refuse to follow the footsteps of their parents because often there is a kind of chain that is impossible to break and this generates feelings of frustration and rejection. My question was whether the chain can be broken or not, and what the consequences are and what involves the separation of the family that ["the mother"] loves." —
David Pablos In 2014, the film
Las Tinieblas, co-written by Pablos and director Daniel Castro Zimbrón, was shown included on the
Cinéfondation official selection during the
2014 Cannes Film Festival. Later that year, after an exhaustive casting process, Pablos filmed
Las Elegidas in Tijuana with non-professional actors. The film was originally based on a book written by Mexican novelist
Jorge Volpi from which Pablos developed a screenplay that features a love story that evolves in a complaint about kidnapping, white slave traffic and prostitution, with a "documentary tone".
Sight & Sound magazine ranked the film at number 118 of their list for the Best Films of 2015. In 2016,
Las Elegidas received 13 nominations for the
58th Ariel Awards and won five awards, including
Best Picture, and
Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Pablos. The film opened theatrically in Mexico on 14 theaters, which according to Pablos was "poor", and a week later was
streamed internationally by
Netflix. Thanks to this distribution deal, Pablos was contacted by British band
White Lies to hire him to direct a music video for the track "Take It Out On Me", the lead single of their album
Friends (2016), after Harry McVeigh, lead singer of the band, watched
Las Elegidas. In 2016, Pablos worked on the film adaptation of the novel
Los Detectives Salvajes written by Chilean author
Roberto Bolaño. ==Filmography==