When Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s series “The New Years” world premiered at the Venice Film Festival alongside new series from Alfonso Cuarón, Thomas Vinterberg and Joe Wright, Spanish critics hailed it as the country’s best series of the year.
Three weeks later, when Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s “Querer” bowed at San Sebastián, another set of Spanish reviewers greeted it as the country’s best series of 2024.
Both are Movistar Plus+ originals and bear out the production philosophy of the biggest Spanish pay TV and SVOD operator, expressed by Domingo Corral, Movistar Plus+ content director, at a breakfast with Spanish journalists in early October, of “[artistic] quality, production quality, a closeness to viewers, an auteurist vision but broad audience ambition.”
That may seem a contradiction but has reaped large dividends for Movistar Plus+.
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“After big soccer matches and a Carlos Alcaraz [tennis] final, our original series are the most-viewed content on Movistar Plus+. Three out of four of our clients watch original productions,” Corral added.
Ruiz de Azúa and Sorogoyen are not any old auteurs either. Ruiz de Azúa’s first feature “Lullaby” was endorsed by Pedro Almodóvar as “undoubtedly the best Spanish debut for years.” About a young mother struggling with motherhood, it went on to gross €823,933 ($906,326) in Spain, an exceptional haul for a debut.
Sorogoyen’s latest movie, “The Beasts,” swept Spain’s Goyas last year and won the foreign film César in France, beating four Cannes Festival 2022 and 2023 competition winners: “Triangle of Sadness,” “EO,” “Close” and “Boy From Heaven.” It grossed $2.5 million in France and an extraordinary $7.5 million in Spain.
Querer
Courtesy of San Sebastián Film Festival
Both “Querer” and “The New Years” are productions exploiting the episodic structure of series but shot with a cinematographic flair. “We always thought it was good for it to be a series because of the ellipses that the episodes allow, but in terms of language I thought from a cinematic point of view,” said Ruiz de Azúa about “Querer” before San Sebastian.
A four-part miniseries, “Querer,” begins in Bilbao, Spain’s Basque country, as fifty-something Miren, the wife in a seemingly perfect marriage, goes to a police station to accuse her husband of 30 years of sexual assault. She secures his prosecution.
“Querer” intertwines family drama with a court case thriller, with Miren shot using many fixed-camera medium shots. “It’s a series that deals a lot with judgment, how we judge what we see, what we see in intimacy and in the trial. It seemed important for the camera to not bevery manipulative, to maintain a distance to both characters,” says Ruiz de Azúa.
Set on every New Years’ Eve from 2015 to 2024 and collected in two five-episode parts aimed at theatrical play, “The New Years” turns on Ana and Oscar, who meet when turning 30, captured from first infatuation to first break-up and way beyond.
There are no credit crawls between episodes, and each vary in style, setting and sometimes viewpoint from the meet cute of Ep. 1 to the romantic comedy of Ep. 3 and near psychological horror film of Ep. 5. Sorogoyen and co-directors David Martín de los Santos and Sandra Acevedo Romero helm with a preference to sequence shots, climaxing in the one-shot Ep. 10, lasting 409 minutes.
“‘The New Years’ begins talking about a couple and ends up talking about life, about motherhood and losing loved ones, how friends go away, losing friendships, and wondering about your place in the world” Sorogoyen told Variety.
It’s maybe a coincidence – or maybe not – that “The New Years” Ep. 6 is set in France’s Lyon, the birthplace of cinema, and “Querer” made in the Basque Country which straddles Spain and France.
“It’s a focus on character development, intimacy, and the human experience with all this complexity and vulnerabilities that defines French cinema,” Alfonso Cuarón said recently. That description also describes “The New Years” and “Querer,” the most filmic of Spanish series.
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