Netflix built the mythical town of Macondo, the setting of “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, from the ground up for the first-ever screen adaptation of the late Colombian Nobel winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s epic allegory of life in Latin America.
Another classic of Latin American literature, one which Garcia Marquez claimed to have learned by heart, “Pedro Paramo” by Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo, has also been made into a Netflix series.
The political heirs of Marquez and Rulfo are also getting a look in, with the best-selling novel “Like Water for Chocolate” by Laura Esquivel, about the magical powers of food, finding a new home on Max.
Other adaptations in the works include Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa’s “The Bad Girl” and “The House of the Spirits” by Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende, which will premiere this year on Prime Video, with Allende herself and “Desperate Housewives” star Eva Longoria as executive producers.
“It was a coincidence that they all landed around the same time,” Francisco Ramos, Netflix’s Vice President of Content for Latin America, told AFP.
For the Mexican producer, the leitmotif is that all “are very good stories” that “tell us very interesting things about the cultures of those countries.”
Distinctive voices
While most of the series are based on novels, two famous Argentine comics are also getting the streaming treatment.
“Mafalda,” the satirical comic strip about an inquisitive six-year-old, who captured the hearts of Spanish speakers worldwide in the 1960s and 1970s, is being turned into a Netflix series by Oscar-winning film director Juan Jose Campanella.
Ditto the 1950s sci-fi comic “The Eternaut” about an alien invasion of Buenos Aires.
“These are two very specific works that have had international reach, so it is also about exporting (Argentine) culture,” Ramos said in Buenos Aires during a press screening of the first episode of “The Eternaut,” which will premiere on April 30.
Argentine communication expert Leonardo Murolo said the two comics were well-chosen, as markers of popular culture that also have distinct political undertones.
In a country where people debate politics “all the time and have a critical view of their history,” the two comics offer a “distinctive contribution” to the streaming tsunami, he told AFP.
‘Well-known stories’
