One Hundred Years of Solitude is about human destiny, Netflix series director says
Ahead of screening of 2 episodes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez adaptation in Cuba, where Netflix is banned, series co-director on what it means
Outside the Yara cinema in Cuba’s capital on December 6, workers prepared for a screening of the first TV adaptation of one of Latin America’s most beloved novels, a mammoth challenge taken on by streaming giant Netflix and filmed entirely in Colombia.
The first two chapters of One Hundred Years of Solitude – a 16-episode series split in two parts – will be presented at the Havana film festival on the Caribbean island nation, where residents are blocked from accessing Netflix among other US websites.
It is considered one of the most important works of magical realism – a style pioneered in Latin America blending realism with the fantastic – and a key product of the experimental and political literary movement known as the Latin American Boom.
Alex Garcia Lopez, who co-directed Part 1 alongside Laura Mora, said that when he read the novel in his twenties he was blown away by its ability to simultaneously tell the story of a country, a continent and the human race.
For him, at the heart of the story is whether human beings can “beat our destiny, or if we are programmed to keep making the same mistakes generation after generation”.