The Canarian director, screenwriter and producer Roberto Pérez Toledo has died at the age of 43 in Madrid, as reported by the Film Academy. His death has coincided with the performance these days of his first play, ‘Basic Manual of Sign Language to Break Hearts’, at the María Guerrero Theater with a production by the National Drama Center.
The filmmaker was scheduled to participate this Monday in a meeting at the Film Academy that included the showing of his short films ‘Vuelco’, ‘Los gritones’, ‘RotosS’, ‘Yes to everything’, ‘Tris’, ‘Secret admirer’, ‘Taras’, ‘Author’s love’, ‘Whenever I tell it’, ‘Hydroalcoholic’ and ‘Before the eruption’.
In addition, the previous week he presented at the National Dramatic Center ‘Basic manual of sign language to break hearts’, a love story between two boys with disabilities. “It is a story about people, not about people with disabilities and without disabilities, where these two characters are going to discover that what separates them is not learning sign language, but rather being contradictory people,” Pérez Toledo pointed out then in statements collected by Europe Press.
As he explained then, the work was “a story about love that helps to know who each one is, about growing up and finding your place in the world without anyone pressuring you.” “It’s also about identity, about closets — which still exist — and about the people who help you figure out who you are,” he noted.
A native of Lanzarote, Pérez Toledo premiered in 2012 ‘Six points on Emma’, his first feature film as director and screenwriter, with which he won various awards. A year later he participated in the collective feature film ‘At the end, everyone dies’ along with three other directors, and a year later he launched the TV-movie ‘The rare friends’, which became a viral phenomenon on the web, where it accumulates more than 22 million views. visited.
In 2017 he premiered ‘Like foam’, his third solo film. In addition, he has been the director and screenwriter of more than 40 short films. He recently created and directed ‘Amor superdotado’, the first Spanish fiction series for Facebook Watch, and shot the feature film ‘Places to which we have never gone’.