Hugo Lazcano/ Reform Agency
Sunday, February 12, 2023 | 06:48
CDMX.- The world, as we live in it now, is collapsing. Money is no longer worth it, the technological base is on the verge of a blackout and the environmental and political crises have the population fighting in the streets for basic necessities. The extinction of society is only a matter of time…
Although it is a very faithful adaptation of the French dystopian miniseries L’Effondrement (2019), El Colapso, the premiere of ViX+, warns some of its makers, it has its own identity thanks to the universality of its approach, through which, outside from the entertainment side, they hope that it will invite the Mexican viewer to reflect on realities that already violate the human condition.
“If the structures fall, it is not only a European problem (as the original series poses), it affects us all and the fear is general. The challenge of this concept was to bring it to our idiosyncrasies and the context here to connect and empathize with characters that are very much ours, very Latino”, says Julián de Tavira, who alternately directs the episodes of this production together with Carlos Lenin and José Manuel Cravioto.
The hallmark of the stories (“El Supermercado”, “La Gasolinera”, “El Avión”, “La Aldea”, “La Refinería”, “El Asilo”, “La Isla” and “La Conferencia de Prensa”) is that they were recorded in a single take in sequence shots ranging from 20 to 28 minutes.
The vertiginous visual narration that the spectator sees, adds De Tavira, was a shared risk between the actors and the technical team, since there was only one day of rehearsal for each plot, to be filmed the next day without cuts.
“The sequence shot is something that I would love to do every day of my career, because the experience was incredible, a very nice challenge of concentration, of working as a team, of always being present… with a lot of adrenaline!”, he says the actress Isabel Burr, who participates in “El Avión”, next to Armando Hernández.
Burr, known for her participation in soap operas such as Si Nos Dejan and Niñas Mal, plays the young lover of a businessman, who is contacted as an emergency by a telephone dispatcher to coordinate his departure from the country in just 13 minutes, leaving his wife to fend for themselves. couple.
“The intention in my character is that she precisely did not understand what was happening with her partner, because she also does not know what is happening in the world and does not understand the magnitude of the problem until she understands that they are abandoning her.
“I hope that the series makes us ask ourselves if we think we are aligned with others, if we are the people we think we are with the family, with the rest of society,” says the also model.
From various angles and situations, in El Colapso they coexist what faces a petrochemical engineer who seeks to avoid a city disaster (Flavio Medina), a father desperate to find refuge with his daughters (Osvaldo Benavides) or a caregiver for the elderly betrayed by an ex. co-worker (Kristyan Ferrer).
The last episode, starring José María de Tavira, who is the one that lasts the longest, reflects on the actions of governments in the face of calamities and disasters.
The actor from the series Malinche and from the film Perdida plays an environmental activist who breaks into the conference of an environmental secretary to report the seriousness of what they are facing.
“I loved being part of this because the issues discussed in the discussion that my character has with the secretary of the environment are issues that occupy my days and I like to think about them. It seems to me that the discussion is very well written, very well run, in the sense that it is difficult, from my point of view, to think about who is right.
“Hopefully the series sows concern about knowing what we are doing right with our days on this planet and to what extent we should, or not, behave as we have been doing with the environment and with those who inhabit this planet,” he says.
Other figures such as Adriana Paz, Ianis Guerrero, Irán Castillo, Tiaré Scanda, Ximena Lamadrid, Gustavo Sánchez Parra, Enrique Arrizon and Mercedes Hernández participate in this production that can already be seen in Latin America, Europe and the US.
