Can a 13-year-old child be considered a sexual offender? If it is considered, then another question arises: Whose responsibility is it? From the boy, from the family or from society? Leticia Dolera, after signing Perfect Life that won the Feroz for best comedy series of 2019, delves into raw dramatic territory when talking about sexual assaults among minors with Pubertat, her television project for Max.
The harmony of a community is disrupted by a report of sexual assault on social networks that points to three teenagers as culprits. The adults in charge of those accused, as aggressors and as victims, will have to deal with the tension of the situation and confront their own relationship with sexuality. In the process they will discover that perhaps not only traditions are passed from generation to generation, but also taboos and traumas.
“In puberty, sexuality and the changes in our body go through us and make us vulnerable. In a social context where, on the one hand, everything is pornified and objectified and, on the other, sex and intimacy continue to be taboo, how do adolescents approach something as intimate and radical as sexuality? How do we adults do it? “Are we prepared to accompany them?” declared Dolera.
The series, which will be filmed in Catalonia this coming summer, will be set in the world of human towers: “Pubertat talks about the legacy between generations, between fathers and mothers and their sons and daughters, both on a cultural, emotional or psychological level; also about how tradition and progress coexist today with a certain tension. That’s why it seemed to me that the context of popular culture was fertile and ideal ground for the series.”
He considers that this popular practice has a symbolic and cathartic value: “I was attracted to history by the naturalization of contact with the body when performing a castell. The body seen as something to integrate and not something to fear, hide or be ashamed of. I think that, in short, a colla castellera is like a small society, on a human and political level, it is a mirror in which to look at ourselves.”
On its team, Dolera has Almudena Monzú to co-write three of the six planned episodes of Pubertat and Manuel Burque and David Gallart as collaborators in the final stretch of the development process. The project is considered a Max Original and not an HBO Max Original because this spring Warner Bros Discovery is scheduled to change the name of the platform in Spain after having already done so in the United States.
