One is set in a neighborhood with privileged views of the city, another takes place between casting sets and alternative environments, and a third shows a Barcelona of alleys stretching and young people with smeared mascara exploring the night until the end, fleeing the gentrified circuit. They are three examples of the new wave of series that, flirting with autofiction, reflect a city far 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 excitement that persists in the planetary imagination since the ’92 Games. They offer a very lively and kaleidoscopic image of the city in a terrain that, as is the case of series, perhaps needed to renew the style.
The three examples cited, that is, the brand new Això no és Suècia, starring Aina Clotet and Marcel Borràs (a couple with two children also in real life), the celebrated Selftape, in which the characters of the sister actresses are played by the well-known Joana and Mireia Vilapuig, and the groundbreaking Autodefensa, written by the two protagonist friends, Berta Prieto and Belén Barenys, also share a sometimes unexpectedly parodic and caustic feminine perspective on feelings and human relationships: fear, sex, limits…
“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 with many things, since the great tourist and political symbols are left behind, we already take them for granted, they are in the ecosystem: the Agbar tower, the Vela hotel or the Fòrum are not part of a Barcelona of expectation, because the expectation is left behind,” says Jaume Ripoll, co-founder of Filmin, which has built a mosaic of content in which autofiction 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 very concrete way” .
And with that point of fiction extracted from reality, as is the case of Això no és Suècia, a hilarious parody drama about couples’ desire for perfection in raising children, whose title comes from “això a Suècia no passaria” which a neighbor from Clotet repeated. Co-created, co-directed and co-starring the actress, it is broadcast by TV3 in episodes and is available on RTVE Play.
“I, who have lived on this mountain all my life, when no one still valued it, have seen a whole movement of people arrive who seek nature, but want to be connected to the city,” explains Clotet, taking the morning croissant in the civic center. of the neighborhood. “And it’s nice to universalize the space, Barcelona is full of these places: Montjuïc, Poble Sec, Vallcarca… It’s something aspirational, it exists in all Western cities in the first world.”
The series is based on the parental therapies organized by people from the neighborhood in real life and takes them to a fiction that portrays 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 is a privileged neighborhood, but there are no gardens or luxury, but hills and wild boars…
“I wanted to explain this place,” says Clotet. “We are a generation that wants to do the checks, ‘I have done this, this too’, but how do we do it? –he asks–. The series wants to reflect on control, on the anguish faced with the possibility of making mistakes 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 successful artists and professionals, is one of the neighbors to whom Clotet suggested participating in Això no és Suècia…, playing 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. Despite having a Bollywood star uncle, she is actually a freelance journalist, publishes in The Guardian, is married to a Frenchman and claims her passion for reporting on human rights (especially women’s rights) in war and conflict zones. …
Deepa is the only one in her family whose parents have not arranged a marriage. 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 Bombay, 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, something amazing! When I want chaos, I take the funicular and go downtown.”
“Això is not Suècia is interesting because it portrays another Barcelona, ??which is not mine, but it has the intention of demystifying everything it means to be Catalan, since there are many types of Catalanness and Barcelona is very big,” says Berta Prieto, co-author. of Self-Defense. “We also wanted to avoid romanticization, from showing the Agbar tower as TV3… If it is a tower surrounded by works, no one will ever kiss it! She continues. It makes me angry that they try to romanticize the scenarios of fiction. Public television shows postcard bars and apartments…, and two turkeys with a small budget have to come to better portray the city.”
Regarding the epithet of trash that the series has earned, he says that it was not his intention to film ugly things, but “when we wanted a location, they offered us something of a horrible postcard, the reference of ‘Barcelona open to the world with which to make ourselves visible’. That’s how the hipsters with palm tree wallpaper arrived, which has led to everything becoming more expensive and you not being able to eat a croissant in Gràcia,” he concludes.
For their part, the Vilapuigs ruled out filming in their native Sabadell because “doing it in Barcelona separated us from the bond of truth that Selftape has and we protected the family environment.” Now both sisters live in Barcelona and have a circle of friends linked to film work. “We wanted to show a Barcelona far from the Damm advertisements and emblematic places, make it accessible, a place to be and meet friends, a city that gives a feeling of returning home as well as nostalgic, because our character needed of heat, of the place to which he needs to return.”
