MADRID — Continuing its strong line in cutting-edge Spanish drama series, Germany’s Beta Film has acquired international distribution rights to Mariano Barroso’s “What the Future Holds” (“El día de mañana”), one of the best-received of Movistar +’s recent Original Series.
Beta Film will introduce the series to buyers at next month’s MipTV market.
Directed by Barroso (“Washington Wolves,” “Todas las mujeres”) and produced by Movistar + and Mod Producciones, headed by Fernando Bovaira, whose producer credits include Alejandro Amenábar’s “The Others” and Oscar winner, “The Sea Inside” and Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s “Biutiful,” “What the Future Holds” turns on Justo Gil, a village lad with little education who hits a dazzling 1967 Barcelona – caught by Barroso is a street of high-rise flats stretching to the horizon – determined to make it big and thinking the world is there for the taking. He meets Carme, who works at her uncle’s printers. They fall in love.
But Justo is an orphan, lacks a moral compass and falls in with the wrong families – first passing himself off as an entrepreneur, who’s studied in England, partying with Barcelona’s rich and then, when exposed as a fraud, with Spain’s blow-hard, violent Francoist right which seeks to turn back Spain’s building move towards democracy.
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Carmen finds another family, Spain’s left-wing pro-democracy acting scene, becomes a revered long actress. But they are still, in many way, in love.
A building social thriller and star-crossed love story stretching down the years, “What the Future Holds’” cast is headed by Oriol Pla (“Uncertain Glory”), Aura Garrido (“The Ministry of Time”) and Jesús Carroza (“7 Virgins”). Adapting Ignacio de Martínez Pisón’s same titled-novel, “What the Future Holds” underscores the capacity of limited series to explore character with creativity. The original novel is made up solely of first-person accounts by people who knew Justo. Barroso allows Justo his own voice, creates a chronological serial, but the multi-faceted vision of him remains, just an he is capable of base betrayal and self-sacrificing heroism. Coherence of character is a fictional construct, “What the Future Holds” suggests. This series is far more psychologically acute.
CREDIT: Movistar +
“The spectators of the new streaming platforms often come from cinema but have lost their references there because cinema is ever more a mass phenomenon for very young audiences,” Barroso commented to Variety.
“There is an active adult audience which wants to choose what it sees, not watch what’s offered. That’s a fundamental difference,” he added.
Enthused by the results of “What the Future Holds” – leading Spanish newspaper “El Pais” claimed it was Movistar +’s best series to date when it was first released – Barroso and Movistar + are now developing a second series together, “La linea invisible,” on the origins of Basque separatist group ETA and the first of its 853 assassinations, of Civil Guard José Antonio Pardines in 1968.
CREDIT: Movistar +
