One is set in a neighborhood with privileged views over the city, another takes place between casting sets and alternative environments and a third shows a Barcelona of alleyways that are getting out of hand and young people with tired mascara who explore the night until the end, escaping the circuit gentrified These are three examples of the new wave of series that, flirting with self-fiction, reflect a city far removed from the postcard.
In their hands, Barcelona is another character in the plot, a place that exhibits its drive and leaves behind the cliché of an exciting place that lives on in the planetary imagination since the 1992 Games. They offer a very vivid image. and kaleidoscopic view of the city in a terrain that, like that of the series, perhaps needed to renew the style.
The three examples cited, i.e. the brand new This is not Sweden, starring Aina Clotet and Marcel Borràs (a couple with two children also in real life), the celebrated Selftape, in which the characters of sister actresses play the well-known Joana and Mireia Vilapuig, and the groundbreaking Autodefensa, written by the same friends who star in it, Berta Prieto and Belén Barenys, also share a sometimes unexpectedly parodic or even caustic feminine view of human feelings and relationships: the fear, sex, boundaries…
“It is a moment in which the fiction of this city has been able to understand and recreate the different Barcelonas that exist. A city after many things, since the great touristic and political symbols are left behind, we take them for granted, they are in the ecosystem: the Agbar tower, the Vela hotel or the Forum are not part of an expected Barcelona , as the expectation is left behind”, points out Jaume Ripoll, co-founder of Filmin, which has built a mosaic of content in which self-fiction and Barcelona are relevant. “The Raval as a space had a pending task – he says – and in the case of Selftape and Autodefensa there is this idea of ??a city lived since the post-adolescence of two pairs of sisters or friends, who live it in a way very specific”.
And with this point of fiction taken from reality, as is the case with This is not Sweden, this parodic and at times hilarious drama that portrays the desire for perfection in raising children. The title arises from the recurrent phrase “this would not happen in Sweden”, repeated by a resident of Clotet. Co-created, co-directed and co-starred by the actress herself, it is broadcast by TV3 in episodes and is available on RTVE Play.
“I have lived in this mountain all my life, when no one valued it yet, I have seen a whole movement of people arrive who are looking for nature but want to be connected to the city”, explains Clotet eating his morning croissant in the civic center of the neighborhood “And it’s nice to universalize space, Barcelona is full of these places: Montjuïc, Poble Sec, Vallcarca… It’s aspirational, it’s in all Western cities in the first world.”
The series starts from the parental therapies organized by people in the neighborhood in real life. Here they appear in fictional form, portraying those who “want it all”: “they want calm, but at the same time they are connected urbanites; they come in search of comfort, but living up here is not comfortable; it’s a privileged neighborhood, but there are no gardens or luxury, just hills and wild boars… I wanted to explain this place”, says Clotet. “We are a generation that wants to do the checks, ‘I’ve done this, this too…’, but how do we do it? – he asks himself. The series wants to reflect on control, on the anxiety in view of the possibility of making a mistake and doing it wrong. And there Sweden represents this ideal, this paradigm of sustainable parenting”.
Sitting next to her, in the cafe in this neighborhood full of artists and successful professionals, is one of the neighbors whom Clotet proposed to take part in This is not Sweden… pretending to be herself.
“Imagine, my first acting job and I had to be myself!” exclaims Deepa Parent, born in Bombay and landed in Barcelona a few years ago. Although she has a Bollywood star uncle, she is actually a freelance journalist who publishes in The Guardian, is married to a Frenchman and claims her passion for reporting on human rights (especially women’s) in war and conflict zones. .even if he has two small children.
Deepa is the only one of her sisters whose parents have not arranged a marriage for her. She married someone from another culture and another religion, she says, happy to have moved to this unusual Barcelona. “The energy of this city reminds me of Mumbai, but I also like having my own little community. I found this place on YouTube, we didn’t even know there would be views with the sea in the background. My friends tell me that this is not Barcelona: well, Barceloneta is not the only Barcelona that exists, there is a mountain in the middle of the city, an amazing thing! When I want chaos, I take the funicular and go downtown.”
“This is not Sweden is interesting because it portrays another Barcelona, ??which is not mine, but it intends to demystify everything that it means to be Catalan, since there are many types of Catalanness and Barcelona is very big”, notes Berta Prieto, co-author of Autodefensa. “We also wanted to get away from romanticisation, from showing the Agbar tower as TV3… when in reality it is a tower surrounded by works where no one will ever kiss! – he continues -. It makes me angry that they try to romanticize the scenarios of a fiction. Public television shows picture-postcard bars and flats… and two popes must come with a small budget to better portray the city.”
Regarding the epithet of trash that the series has earned, he says that it was not his intention to shoot ugly things, but “when we wanted a location, they offered us something like a horrible postcard, the referent of ‘Barcelona open to the world, what to do with visible to us’. That’s how the palm tree wallpaper hipsters arrived who have made everything more expensive and you can’t eat a croissant in Gràcia”, he concludes.
For their part, the Vilapuigs ruled out filming in their native Sabadell because doing it in Barcelona “disconnected us from the true bond that Selftape has and we were protecting the family environment”. Now the two sisters live in Barcelona and have a circle of friends linked to film work. “We wanted to show a Barcelona away from the advertisements on the Damm and emblematic places, make it accessible, a place to be and meet friends, a city that gives a feeling of coming home at the same time as nostalgic, since our character needed warmth, from the place he needs to return to”.
