«La Estrategia del Caracol» (The Strategy of the Snail, 1993) encapsulates the imperative of the popular Latin-American understanding of our social, political and economic position with a tone of optimism close to the universe of magic realism. With a structure base on flashbacks, the film turns the story and its characters into a myth or a legend of the most genuine popular epic resonance. Cabrera uses this narrative resource to provide the film with a strong symbolic character: in six years, nothing changes, the living conditions on the city of Bogota (as in any city of the world) continue to be as harder as earlier times. This hyperbolic approach always plays in favour of the film, which never loses its narrow link to the Colombian reality. Raising topics of social importance as the hard living conditions of the big cities that are divided into rich and poor quarters, rich and industrialized areas and underdeveloped areas, or the dependence of the power to favour the interests of the capitalist economy. The film gives a small scope on how the regular Colombian people can assimilate its own path in order to solve or understand these problems. It is through symbols of respect, solidarity, freedom and even death that Cabrera finds the language of the strength of ideas and the joy of life, even if you were born in the middle of a fight of classes.
«Rosario Tijeras» (2005) a film based on the novel of Jorge Franco, deals with the darkest years in Colombian history, during the decade of the 1980s. Through memories is reconstructed the brief life of Rosario. A tragic and symbolic figure of a dominating, beautiful, lethal and unforeseeable woman who has managed to leave the underworld of the slums of Medellin to join the world of the barons of the narcotraffic and narcoterrorism in times of Pablo Escobar. Rosario personifies the anchor between different worlds formed in the film, some symbolized and represented by the discotheque «Acuarius» a place of meeting and contact. Her role is also of an initiator and anti-guide, as she leads in some scenes both real and fictional, the descent into hell. «Rosario Tijeras» is a story of perdition, and of a metamorphosis of a few lives neither shallow or infamous. A losers' history, in which three protagonists either lose a dear one or themselves or die. By means of paradigms, the «roguish» subgenre in the film is established, in the context of violence and the moral duality of the Colombian society during the dark years of the 1980s.