The idea of ??necessary fiction should be banished from television criticism for often confusing the moral or political discourse of a series with its intrinsic quality, for extolling the work over its audiovisual value, sometimes even reducing it to being a victim of a culture war. How many works have we seen oversized for having the right speech at the right time? But, having said this, the words make their way from consciousness to the tips of these fingers that type in an impulse that is as predictable as it is inevitable: Las noches de Tefía, which arrived at Atresplayer this Sunday, is a necessary series.
The playwright and screenwriter Miguel del Arco delves into a little-explored chapter of the Franco regime: the Tefía Penitentiary Agricultural Colony in the Canary Islands, a concentration camp to which those detained under the regime’s law of vagrants and thugs were sent. This meant that there were both pimps and gay, bisexual and transsexual people there. The prisoners had no choice but to work from sunup to sundown in precarious situations, receive torture and humiliation, and supposedly be re-educated for reintroduction into society as reformed beings, not deviant.
Las noches de Tefía begins with Airam (Marcos Ruiz) arriving at the false agricultural colony. He is silent, shy and discreet, the opposite of Vespa (Patrick Criado), a recidivist homosexual who returns there and raises the spirits of the prisoners. The enthusiasm and optimism of the Vespa is not unconscious: he knows that being there is hell but he feels the duty to vindicate the humanity of all of them, that no one be ashamed of their sexuality or their gender orientation. And, to get out of there even symbolically, at night everyone surrenders to the stories of Charlie (Miquel Fernández), a prisoner with a gift for telling stories, who takes them to Tindaya, a musical bar where everyone has a paper.
This production is timely and not precisely because these days Pride is celebrated and so Atresplayer has a proposal to sell to the collective while the third edition of Drag Race is over. In a context in which the neo-Francoism of VOX enters with force in institutions such as the Valencian and the Balearic Islands, and in which it does not hesitate to send flags to the bin such as the LGTBQ and the estelada, Tefía proposes to do a bit of historical memory. She reminds us who the executioners were and her essence is not far from the bullfighter vice presidents.
This concentration camp past, shown in black and white, is a success. It offers a fictitious but credible document of a concentration camp that was active between 1954 and 1966. Its author moves comfortably in that difficult terrain between showing the harshness of the situations and getting beyond the victimization of the characters, who do not they lose their humanity despite being beaten or raped. The camera makes sure to highlight that shine in the eyes: their existence is recognized even if in that present they were simply outcasts.
Of course, Las noches de Tefía plays with three narrative lines. Apart from showing the day-to-day life of the neighborhood, it also shows Airam in 2004 facing a traumatic past and also shows the world invented by Charli, the Tindaya bar. The mature Airam, played by Jorge Perugorría, has trouble standing on his own: both the development of his conflict and the secondary ones are treated superficially. With respect to Tindaya, he understands its conceptual raison d’être: it is the world to which prisoners flee. It serves as a light counterpoint to the harshness of the concentration camp. It allows us to see the fullness of their personalities if they did not live in such an unfair reality. But does it make sense to invest so much time in an invented reality? With the interest that reality arouses in Tefía, Tindaya becomes almost an obstacle to invest in the stories and real emotions of the characters.
Las noches de Tefía, therefore, is a series that has a powerful story to tell but, afraid of being too crude, wastes time with disconnected musical numbers. In their presentation, at least, it is difficult to justify them beyond the anecdote, the whim, when the reality in black and white is much more interesting.
