SAN SEBASTIAN — Amid large expectation, HBO Europe has revealed first footage giving a first sense of tone and pace of its Spanish original series “Patria.”
A packed-to-overflowing press conference on Saturday morning at the San Sebastian Festival can be read as one sign of the potential popularity of the eight-part series.
The panel sneak-peek was attended by “Patria” creator and writer Aitor Gabilondo (“El Príncipe”), actresses Elena Irureta and Ane Gabarain, who play the leads, the series HBO producers Miguel Salvat and Steve Matthews, head of development HBO Europe.
“Patria” weighs in as HBOs signature Spanish series. It was HBOs first series announced out of Spain, two years ago on the eve of 2017s San Sebastian Festival, when it was still in development.
That development proved characteristically lengthy.
“Steve worked with Aitor on the development of the scripts from a distance,” Salvat said in San Sebastian. “He hadnt read the book as it wasnt published yet in English. For us the development is the most important part, it is the foundation of what we are building.”
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Matthews commented: “This is a very complex book. I think this book is about armed conflict, but its also about memory, aging, forgiving and forgetting.”
Also indicative is the series artistic ambition, enhancing the HBO viewing experience for Spaniards and beyond as a small-screen adaptation of Fernando Aramburus 646-page novel, published in 2016 and one of the most acclaimed takes on the biggest conflict in the recent history of Spain.
Equally characteristically, “Patria,” slated for release in 2020, turns on character.
“The personal aspect is key to the series,” says “Patria” producer Miguel Salvat.
“Patria” focuses on a 60something woman, Bittori, who has cancer, who returns to her native village in the Basque Country Gipuzkoa and seeks reconciliation with her best friend, after they were torn part by the Basque conflict.
“Patria is not about ETA. Its a journey towards an embrace,” Gabilondo told the Spanish press at San Sebastian.
“The novel describes how normal people lived, people who werent politicians, in the military nor police, nor terrorists,” Gabilondo told Variety.
“It turns on the suffering on the street, how everybody was worried about what was going out, and didnt talk, couldnt really comment, or feel, without running the risk of being said to be on this side of the fence, and being used.”
“Patria isnt so much about a fact,” he added. “Everybody knows the Chernobyl reactor blew up. The series is more about the wound or wounds that something left, which fiction can maybe do better than journalism.”
“We show that violence destroys everything. Violence and the victims, it harms both sides. Relationships, self esteem, everything is destroyed,” said Gabilondo. The series “focuses on what moved me most about the novel,” he added.”We have two sisters, very normal women in a small and normal town. For it to be representative, we had to show what they lived, when they split up and how they end in an embrace.”
He added: “We wanted to show themes from two points of view. What interested me about the story is that its about two families both with whom we could identify.”
A silence fell over the audience as Salvat and Gabilondo revealed the first images ever seen from the series. In what will be the series title sequence, Bittori runs towards an inert body – her husband Taxtos – on a bridge under pouring rain. She screams in anguish for help, but nobody in her own native village comes to help her. Her solitude, and the hostility of the village, is plain.
In a second sequence shown at San Sebastian, a detainee, ETA member Joxe Mari, Mirens son, is bound naked on a floor as police come into the interrogation room chatting. blithe to his predicament. about the coffee, and other tittle-tattle.
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