The popular actor presents in Cádiz a series directed by Jaime Botella, in which he shares the cast with Jorge Sanz and Lucía de la Fuente.
French director Xavier Giannoli has also unveiled Of money and blood, a series about a million-dollar scam involving carbon credits.
The South International Series Festival today hosted the presentation of Serrines, madera de actor, in a meeting with journalists that Arantxa Écija, Mediaset’s fiction director, opened with these words: “Welcome to a macarrada”. And “macarra” was undoubtedly the most repeated word at a lighthearted press conference attended by the director, Jaime Botella, and the three leading actors, Antonio Resines, Jorge Sanz and Lucía de la Fuente.
“We mess with everyone, but always with us first,” said Antonio Resines who, in addition to putting his face as the main actor, is the creator of this project, the most important of his career as he has assured. Serrines (Resines) is an actor in the twilight of his career, he has recognition but lacks prestige. This is why he hires his niece and commissions her to look for scholarly works with which to gain recognition.
However, Resines has denied that the character is like him. “Everyone knows that I am an excellent person and Serrines is a jerk, but he is a jerk who, deep down, is a good person,” he stressed. However, there are situations taken from real life, as Jorge Sanz wanted to point out, “red carpet, castings… these are situations that we live day by day”, he commented. “It looks like real life but very exaggerated.”
On the other hand, Jaime Botella commented that the series is still a fiction, although it does not separate itself from the documentary genre, “it plays with ambiguity”. Finally, Lucía de la Fuente, the youngest of the group, who despite having a long list of audiovisual titles behind her, expressed her gratitude for having been able to work with these two actors, living classics of Spanish cinema “I have learned a lot, they are two actors who know everything. It has been like doing a masterclass all the time during the filming”. Serrines, madera de actor will be available early next year on Amazon Prime Video.
For his part, French director Xavier Giannoli presented, also in tomorrow’s session, the series Of money and blood (De argent et de sang), an ambitious production that revolves around the carbon quota scam that caused a huge scandal in the neighboring country in 2010, and which was inspired by the book of the same name by journalist Fabrice Arfi. “Since I read it, I immediately thought of fiction,” says Giannoli, also known for his work in film, with hits such as When I Was a Singer or The Lost Illusions. “It’s very rare for a director to find such rich material from real events. But I didn’t want to make a documentary. I believe in cinema and fiction, and thanks to Canal + it has been possible to complete this project”.
Giannoli also assures that throughout the process he felt “totally free to be able to make a series like this and explore the story in all its complexity”. Asked by journalists about the differences between shooting a film and a series, he said that in the specific case of Of money and blood “it was like working on a fresco. I didn’t have to format the style of the mise-en-scene. It is a 12-episode story, but they have soul, strength and identity. With series, as in cinema, there are commercial products without much ambition and others that do”.
The director, who at some point in the series focuses on the French Sephardic community, has expressed his sorrow for the conflict that has broken out these days in Israel and Palestine, while stressing that the series touches on very different subjects from the initial research, “from religion, ecology… What interested me when I read Arfi’s book was not so much the facts, but all the questions that arise from them about human nature. What human beings do with the world and with themselves”.
South International Series Festival is a private initiative sponsored by the Consejería de Turismo, Cultura y Deporte de la Junta de Andalucía, co-financed with European funds, Ayuntamiento de Cádiz, Diputación de Cádiz, and the participation of Mediaset España as main media sponsor. Also collaborating in this first edition are Movistar Plus+, Spain Film Commission, Fundación SGAE, Fundación Bancaria Unicaja and Canal Sur.
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