Hundreds of fans gathered outside the Yara cinema in Cuba’s capital on Friday evening 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.
The first two chapters of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” - a 16-episode series in two parts - were presented at the Havana film festival on the Caribbean island nation where residents are blocked from accessing Netflix among other U.S. websites.
“As Cubans do not have access to Netflix, this is an opportunity to see an important part of Latin American culture,” spectator Ruth Guerra told Reuters, as a big, largely local crowd waited for the public screening.
“(Writer) Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Latin American icon and we Cubans feel very connected to him.”
“I never thought it would be brought to the cinema,” said Cuban actress and cast member Jacqueline Arenal. “It was and I have the opportunity to be a part of it. I can’t express the emotion that means.”
The show adapts Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1967 classic that chronicles seven generations of the Buendia family - many of whose members share the same names - in the fictional town of Macondo.
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.
Director Alex Garcia Lopez, who co-helmed Part 1 alongside Laura Mora, told Reuters that when he read the novel in his 20s 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.”
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“This is very human,” he said, pointing to the book’s parallels to growing political polarization in the United States and Europe.
“The book captured that in 1967 and it remains extremely important today.”
Promotional videos released ahead of Part 1’s Dec. 11 Netflix debut show exquisite 19th-century costumes and lush tropical scenery from Colombia’s Caribbean coast.
Garcia Marquez, who died in 2014, had been reluctant to sell the rights for a Hollywood-esque adaptation of his novel.
Netflix’s Latin American content vice president, Francisco Ramos, told Reuters, however, that the agreement with Garcia Marquez’s sons had been “very straightforward,” as Netflix committed early on to produce the show entirely in Colombia, in Spanish, and to use the series format to translate the novel’s immense hundred-year scope.
The series credits the authors’ two sons as executive producers.
“Adapting a masterpiece is a huge challenge,” Ramos said. “We never had any doubt the enormous talent from Latin America - in this case mostly from Colombia - would be up to the task. They just needed the support and opportunity.”
Ramos said Netflix, which recently released a film adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 Mexican classic “Pedro Paramo,” is now working on adaptations of works from Mexican writers Jorge Ibarguengoitia and Angeles Mastretta as well as from Colombia’s Laura Restrepo.
Netflix ranks crime dramas set around Latin America such as “Narcos” and “Griselda” as some of its most popular series.
But for Ramos, the quality, ambition and technical detail of the Garcia Marquez adaptation makes it a “paradigm changer” for Latin American television.
“We almost always export these stories of drug traffickers, illegal immigrants, prostitution, poverty and dictatorships,” Garcia Lopez noted.
“We want to show the world that we are more than what they know us for.”
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