Sunday’s South International Series Festival featured the presence of the popular duo Los del Río.
Sunday’s South International Series Festival was attended by the popular duo Los del Río, protagonists of the documentary series Macarena, a production of Producciones del Barrio and Movistar Plus + about the song that made them number one in a dozen countries and sold more than 14 million copies worldwide, and which now celebrates three decades of existence.
“Macarena encourages Humanity. You have to make music and things that entertain people, and this song has achieved it. It has something that hooks the neurons,” said Antonio Romero, composer and member of the veteran Sevillian duo, while his partner, Rafael Ruiz, stressed that the global phenomenon “comes from the constancy that we had been maintaining for 30 years before, and thanks to the Virgin of the Macarena”.
From the rock group Kiss to U.S. President Bill Clinton, who used the song for his presidential campaign, Macarena is for Romero “something we carry in our souls. Clinton is gone, but Macarena is still there, for the next president to come. She has even survived the people who wanted to jump on the bandwagon of her success, some of whom ended up being run over by the wheels of the bandwagon”.
Asked about the possibility that they might get tired of always being asked for the same hit, both have stressed that “if you have children, which of them can you get tired of? We have 400 recorded songs that are like children, and it turns out that Macarena was the outstanding one, what do we do? We love to be asked for it, and we have to do it at least twice in every show”.
The director of the series, Alejandro Marzoa, commented that the purpose of the series is to “dissect a song that comes out of Dos Hermanas and conquers the world”, while Movistar’s executive producer, Jorge Ortiz de Landazuri, added that this production is fully in line with Movistar’s line of dedicating attention to Spanish musical phenomena, where “one of the few elements of Spanish culture that is everywhere” could not be missing.
Previously, the auditorium of the Palacio de Congresos de Cádiz hosted the presentation of the first two chapters of the 1st season of the Israeli production Carthago. Based on a true story, the series is produced by 24 Draft Studios and chronicles the rebellion of Jews in Palestine against the British. The events take place in 1942, when the British build Carthago, a prison camp deep in Africa where the British imprison Italian fascists, Nazi spies and Jewish terrorists. A historical drama written by Reshef Levi, Tome Shani and Yannets Levi and starring Uri Gov, Philip Glenister and Carolina Jurczak, among others, which was recognized at Cannes Series with a special performance award.
Greyhounds’, a business and family drama
Galgos, a Movistar Plus + production directed by Félix Viscarret, was also presented at the South. Part of the cast, Óscar Martínez, Jorge Usón and Adriana Ozores, the director Felix Viscarret, as well as the executive producers Sonia Martínez Ruiz (Buendía Estudios) and Susana Herreras (Movistar Plus +) met in Cádiz to talk about this family saga, a series about power, family and ambition.
“What made me fall in love with the project were the family relationships and the spectacular team behind it: Lucia Carballal, Pablo Ramón, Francisco Kosterlitz and Clara Roquet,” said Viscarret. “I remember the first conversations with Susana and Sonia from Movistar and Buendía, and when they mentioned the casting it was an offer impossible to refuse, there grew a very nice creative process and we decided together the universe of Galgos: the aesthetics, the narrative language, the type of camera tracking. It was a very nice path, because we were starting from something very rich”.
Adriana Ozores, for her part, commented that her character “is very modern and speaks of a situation that women live in today, she has many contradictions. Working with my colleagues has been incredible. Working with actors you admire and how good they all are! I fell in love with the directors’ proposal, that the acting impulse should come before the technique”.
Jorge Usón also agreed with this idea, for whom “the cast is magnificent, Galgos has incredible dialogues and I am very proud to be part of this project. It is a very actor’s series, and there is a bet on the fact that we have to put trust in the family, something that will not always be the case in the series. I vindicate the subtle and sometimes pathetic humor, the intelligence of the scripts and the characters”.
Another of the protagonists, Óscar Martínez, assures that “in my case I remember the impact that reading the scripts had on me, because it is not usual to find such well-written scripts. The conflicts, the universe… It’s not usual. When a script and the characters are so well written and developed, with their complexities, it stimulates the interpreter and makes the work easier. Nelly and Felix love actors and that doesn’t always happen”.
Susana Herreras, executive producer of Movistar Plus +, added that “we had been looking for a series like this for a long time and we wanted to talk about family, power and ambition in a universe where the lines between work and family are very narrow. Irony is very important in the dynamics between the characters. Then we had the best possible talent. I can’t wait to see the reaction from the audience and the press.
Finally, Sonia Martínez Ruiz, executive producer of Buendía Estudios, pointed out that “Movistar seemed to be the ideal client for this series because they wanted to tell a series that talked about the family, with very current issues. We liked to tell the story of such a classic saga, but in a different and very modern way”.
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.
