“The Four Seasons” is just a preliminary title for the documentary series about Pedro Sánchez and Moncloa from the production companies Secuoya Studios and The Pool. But that name sums up its essence: “It’s about following the work of the institution for 12 months and checking how the seasons mark its work cycles,” its director, Curro Sánchez Varela, said by phone on Tuesday. Therefore, it will consist of four chapters, each lasting around 45 minutes, which will be privately funded. The BOE published on September 10th the agreement between the producers and the Secretary of State for Communications for this project announced in March 2022. Although now signed, the first six months of work has been completed and the post-production process is expected to be completed by Spring 2023. The first two installments have already been recorded.
The original idea was to start surveillance on the XXVI. Presidential Conference to begin on the island of La Palma, where the leaders of the autonomous communities will meet the President of the Government. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February changed the team’s plans and conditioned the start of the series to a more “dramatic” one. The first thing we’ll see will be “the President and his most direct team preparing to appear in Congress to address the crisis of the war in Europe,” says its director.
Curro Sánchez Varela, director of The Four Seasons.
The series has two narrative strands. The first tries to explain an institution like La Moncloa, through which political parties of different ideologies have passed in its more than 40-year history “full of liturgies, curiosities and traditions”. This building complex “is a city in itself with almost 3,000 inhabitants,” says Sánchez Varela. The production depicts the various departments that make up the country’s center of power and the roles they play, paying tribute to their workers, from managers to ushers. “Some of them have been in use for decades, since Adolfo Suárez,” says the filmmaker. Raising the location “brick by brick”, the admissions team found a group of firefighters, a master falconer, a place where badges are issued… One of the corners of the place that most impressed him was that of the team in charge for processing the correspondence they receive from citizens. “There are hundreds of weekly letters from all corners of Spain and from Spaniards abroad and these staff are dedicated to answering almost all of them. There are times when a letter relationship develops, because when they get a new reply, they send a message again, even if it happens every week,” comments the filmmaker.
On the other hand, The Four Seasons “at the expense of a lot of paperwork” covers the agenda of President Pedro Sánchez and his team. In the first two parts, it shows the NATO summit in Madrid in June and Sánchez’s visit to Brussels for the European Council meeting in the same month. The director assures that Moncloa does not regularly review the footage: “The first time we showed fragments of the first episode was two weeks ago. The clarifications they made concerned technical problems, corrections to some dates or nomenclature that seemed wrong. Although a human side of Sánchez is added, his daughters do not appear in the documentary, but his wife does, and the president can be seen celebrating his 2022 birthday.
Pedro Sánchez at the NATO summit in Madrid on June 30. Claudia Alvarez
So far, the series has not signed a broadcast deal with any television network or content platform. Not all audiovisual projects are born with one under their arm. And considering The Four Seasons hasn’t even reached post-production yet, “it’s normal” that there’s still no location for the premiere. An example of this is the forthcoming world premiere of Sánchez Varela. Voices of a city, a choral portrait of those who are building a city like Madrid, will be screened in the capital at the end of the month as part of the Screenings Platino Cine professional meeting. It is a documentary feature film that Secuoya Studios “also financed by Lunge [sin un acuerdo de distribución previo, para poner luego a la venta]as happens every year with so many other audiovisual projects in Spain”.
Consulted by EL PAÍS, the production companies that financed the project state that “its commercialization will not be tackled until it is more advanced”, although they have already been in contact with “several potential customers who have expressed an interest in evaluating it have, although they are not yet confirmed, he has taught absolutely nothing. “Both production companies have believed from the outset of the possibilities of a documentary series like this, with similar precedents in other markets, with an unprecedented level of access and around a theme, the operations of La Moncloa, which we believe should be generated Curiosity for a large number of Spaniards, whatever their political ideas,” they defend.
Sánchez Varela, nominated for the Goya Prize for Best New Director for Paco de Lucía: The Search (2014), admits that it is inevitable that part of the public will consider a project with these characteristics as propaganda, but defends that his work “a didactic intention”. After making several documentaries focused on characters of Spanish culture – from his father Paco de Lucía to his cousin Malú or the bullfighter Curro Romero – he approaches this project and the character of Pedro Sánchez with the same formula, however, approaches “with curiosity and empathy. Focusing on specific aspects to build a narrative is always inevitable”.
Unreleased camera access
As explained in the agreement published in the BOE, the producers will not receive any economic benefits from the government and undertake not to interrupt the day-to-day work of the institution. The exploitation rights lie exclusively with the production companies. To cover expenses, they must donate 20% of net income to one or more NGOs selected by the Bureau. The producers have not yet decided what that will be. In addition, Secuoya Studios and The Pool must transfer some of the recorded material not used in the final cut so that La Moncloa can use it for institutional purposes.
Long before filming even wrapped, the series had already sparked political controversy. The PP took action against them. The parliamentary speaker of this party, Cuca Gamarra, claims that “the only interest in this series is Pedro Sánchez’s ego”. “The Spaniards were worried about the exorbitant prices and while Sánchez was obsessed with his streak. We are not here for egotecas, but for solutions,” concluded Gamarra. On the contrary, in La Moncloa, they are very surprised by the controversy of something that no one has fully seen. In the environment of Pedro Sánchez, they insist that the series seemed to them an interesting project to publicize not only the work of the Prime Minister, but especially that of the workers and experts of La Moncloa, some of whom have a long history in the service of multiple governments. . The president, they assure in his team, has not yet seen a fragment of the series, and no one in his team intends to mark the content or guide his line. Yes, the executive decided to authorize this and grant access to the cameras, which was not previously granted in Spain, although this has happened in other countries.
Moncloa lives surrounded by great secrecy and the intention is that this series shows the work of the Presidency in a more natural way, especially in some delicate moments experienced in recent months. Around Sánchez, they only ask the critics to wait and see the outcome of the series to give their opinion, and in any case they insist that Curro Sánchez Varela’s team had complete creative freedom and unprecedented access to meetings and key moments of decision-making in the last few months. The government does not provide a euro of public money to carry out this private project and has no control over it, they insist in La Moncloa. In the executive branch and among the series’ writers, they already assumed that part of society would reject anything to do with Sánchez, but they trust the work will interest those who don’t have initial prejudices against the president have and its administration. .
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