Everything was possible in Marbella in the eighties. As if the two men who controlled the global arms trade lived there, two rivals who supplied the Western and Communist sides in the Cold War and who shared restaurants, shops and even a masseuse in Marbella. In Marbella, which had become the world capital of luxury, arrived Óskar, a young orphan from Madrid's Aluche district, whose ultimate goal up to that point was to go from being an aerobics instructor to owning a gym. “Los Farad,” whose eight chapters are available on Amazon Prime Video, begins with this combination of reality and fiction. Óskar, played by Miguel Herrán, comes to Marbella in the 80s via the Farads, a family that associates with the world elite. A family like any other if they weren't involved in the arms trade.
Mariano Barroso and Alejandro Hernández are the creators of a series that combines family drama with thriller. It all started with the book El traficante, which gave her the idea of dealing with “something very intimate in a very large setting,” explains Barroso. To talk about the new world order brought about by the Cold War, they use as a starting point the story of a young man with a great need to belong and to find his own identity. “It was an opportunity to talk about people who on a human level can be sincere, lovable and lovable and who you would like to vacation with, but who on a moral level are far more than controversial and can be reprehensible and terrible.” , continues the screenwriter and director. “The arms trade was an excuse to penetrate the vicissitudes and inner demons of all families,” continues Alejandro Hernández.
Adam Jezierski, Pedro Casablanc and Nora Navas, in “Los Farad”. Diego Lopez Calvin
“The Farads” is above all the story of a family with its internal tensions, its misunderstood children, its battles over the succession, its secrets coming to light and an unworldly son-in-law who allows himself to be seduced by luxury and money as if it were a drug . And all of this in a very special environment. The arms trade is one of the most money-moving businesses in the world. Although Barroso and Hernández wanted their series to be clearly fictional, the setting and what happened in it had to be very realistic. To this end, they thoroughly documented Marbella, much of which is still preserved today. “Marbella is more than a geographical place, it evokes a whole way of life and a dream, and in the eighties it was Hollywood and California, it was the place where anything was possible. “In the post-Franco era, in a Spain that was still gray, it was color, light, cosmopolitanism,” says Barroso.
Redoubt of Freedom
The two screenwriters met with some of the personalities who have changed this city of Malaga. There they met Count Rudi (Rudolf Schönburg-Glauchau), partner of Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe, real estate developer and founder of the Marbella Club. “We asked the Count what this place has, why Marbella. He told us that they were freer here than anywhere else. Suddenly they took off the costume of the count and the prince and became villains,” says Hernández. One example the Count gave them was a party where there was a donkey, which they couldn't do in Saint-Tropez or Cannes, where they were from. “Ironically, in the 1970s, during the Franco regime, Marbella was a haven of freedom for these people, European aristocrats, who had complete freedom of movement there. Infrastructures were created and in the 80s there were the best hotels, the best restaurants and it was a center of international activity for people with a lot of money,” adds Barroso.
Amparo Piñero, Adam Jezierski, Pedro Casablanc, Nora Navas, Susana Abaitua and Miguel Herrán, the entire Farad family. Diego Lopez Calvin
Documenting information about arms trafficking was no easy task, but the fact that Alejandro Hernández was a soldier and fought in the Angolan War made things easier. “I grew up with these weapons, I knew how to assemble and disassemble a Kalashnikov with my eyes closed. “They are stories that I carry in my backpack and it was time to mix them up.” Hernández is surprised that it is a world that is rarely explored in fiction. “Everything has been written about the drug trade, but not about the world of arms trafficking, perhaps because it is legal to a certain extent and states have interests there.” In addition to their knowledge, they documented themselves with books about human traffickers from different parts of the world to well capture the world in which the two bosses in their story operate, reflections of the two real men who ran the company at the time. The relationships of this dysfunctional family are based on reality, in which Pedro Casablanc plays the father, Nora Navas plays the mother, and Susana Abaitua, Adam Jezierski and Amparo Piñero play the three children.
An image from the series “Los Farad”. Diego Lopez Calvin
The combination of fiction and a current real historical context is nothing new for Barroso and Hernández. The result of their joint work is The Day After Tomorrow, a series set in a seething post-Franco Barcelona that, like the protagonist of his story, was a nest for climbers. In “The Invisible Line” they looked at the origins of ETA. “I come from Cuba and it seems to me that Spain has an amazing, wonderful history, but I saw a certain complexity when it came to delving into the past. Maybe it's the change and trying not to play too much because there is a lot of pain behind it, but little by little it has opened up,” says Alejandro Hernández.
“The key to uniting reality and fiction is the dramatic potential of reality to integrate it into your fictional world,” explains Hernández. And he gives an example: “Few people remember, but the West Wing of the White House had a chapter on Perejil Island, because when they were writing the season, the Perejil thing happened. The President of the United States had to make a decision regarding two allies, Spain and Morocco, who were fighting over a piece of rock. It seemed to me a very interesting way to incorporate a message that was much discussed here, but in the United States it was a short one-day message, and that helped highlight dramatic elements of the infighting in the White House A house.”
Pedro Casablanc, in a picture from “Los Farad”. Diego Lopez Calvin
In this case, two wars have reached their fictional history in reality: the one in Ukraine and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. “When we were working on the final revision of the script and Mariano and I were in Marbella, the war began in Ukraine. Suddenly it was like going back to the 1980s, when Russia became imperialist and invaded Ukraine. In the fifth chapter there is a kidnapping with Israeli hostages by a Palestinian terrorist group… Reality reaches you and surpasses you. “Reading this episode now has a different context than if we had broadcast it two or three years ago,” adds Hernández, who adds: “The world is, in a way, returning to the bipolarity that it abolished in the 1990s .” and that “it reproduces a geopolitics familiar to us from the 1980s.”
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