You can already see ‘Sagrada familia’, the new series by Manolo Caro in Netflix which is a multi-layered Russian doll full of details that little by little they form a complete image, just like the stained glass windows that the protagonist played by Najwa Nimri composes piece by piece. This is Gloria and she lives in one of the exclusive houses in Fuente del Berro with her baby and two other young people, Aitana (Carla Campra) and Abel (Iván Pellicer), about whom little by little we will learn more. Blanca (Macarena Gómez) and her son Lorenzo (Lorenzo Angellotti) and Alicia (Ella Kweku) and Pedro (Jon Olivares) also live in that neighborhood, a couple of school teachers who are trying to have children. Motherhood is the link between these women who are one thing from the outside and another when they go through the doors of their homes.. The arrival of a new couple in the neighborhood will destabilize the coexistence and discover that nothing is what it seems, especially in the case of Gloria, who hides from her past. Together with her, Aitana and Abel make their own journey, to get out of a relationship that is hurting them, which can be summed up in a sentence that the character of Aitana says to the protagonist: “Love and freedom, that is being a good mother”.
One of the keys to ‘Sagrada Familia’ is the cast that Manolo Caro has managed to put together: Najwa Nimri, Alba Flores, Macarena Gómez, Álex García, Carla Campra, Iván Pellicer, Álvaro Rico, Ella Kweku and Jon Olivares, among others. “It is a dream for any director and that I am a foreigner and they have trusted me makes me feel very special,” she says. The cast is a success and luck as he says because he doesn’t cast for the main roles: “I’m making the invitations in the writing process because I like to put a face on them when I’m writing and I was fortunate to have this cast”. In addition, from what the protagonist Najwa Nimri told us, convincing her is not easy, because it is not enough for a script to be good: “I choose more because of what I want to try as an actress at the moment. I ask everything, from who does the lighting and who forms the team. I see what I haven’t seen from the director and I talk to him, I connect the idea of what he wants to do and what he intends to do visually including space shots and see the visual universe I’m going to get into” . Caro’s idea struck a chord with him. “I asked him if it was like a ‘Big Little Lies’ with ‘Ozark’ in a thriller style, but more like a soap opera and I said okay, ‘we’re still not sure, but it seems fresh to me. Let’s go,'” says Nimri.
The series deals with themes such as identity, freedom or loss but, above all, it focuses on motherhood and surrogate motherhood:. “The seed was the surrogacy, a talk with my friends, then what it is to be a mother and that I have seen many women be very good mothers, also make mistakes, because it is not easy,” explains director Manolo Caro. In the 90s in Spain it was not as common to talk about surrogacy as it is now, which is a recurrent and also controversial issue. Precisely, in that decade the story created as part of Manolo Caro’s agreement with Netflix is set: “I really wanted to do something different, to make a thriller, something darker and to try myself. Me when I received the Netflix exclusivity contract what I said was “I’m going to try everything, I’m going to take this as a master”. It’s not easy to combine a subject as sensitive as motherhood with a genre like the thriller, but the result works. And it is that as Álex García, one of the protagonists, says, referring to the director “you have to be a good goldsmith to bring this to fruition”. The actor who plays the enigmatic Germán, the new neighbor who arrives with Katerina (Alba Flores) in the neighborhood, confesses that he was impressed by the idea and that the result has impressed him even more: “You can tell that Manolo likes to get into complicated messes and get out of them by himself.” And come out graceful. “It is a series that talks about family dramas, a thriller that is very well crafted and everything from the point of view of Manolo Caro who never ceases to surprise. The series has a very special personality and will not disappoint”, adds Álex García .
A personality that gives it the visual universe that Caro builds for each of his works. We have seen it in his last works ‘Someone has to die’ and ‘Once upon a time… but not anymore’. He believes that careful treatment has a lot to do with his love for Spain and Alba Flores points out that the affection that the also creator of ‘La Casa de las Flores’ has for Madrid is clear from the series: “As a Madrilenian, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a beautiful look and so interested in saying ‘look at Madrid and its brutalism’. The scene that takes place in the swimming pool of one of the most emblematic buildings of this architectural current in the city, the White Towers designed by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza. Macarena Gómez also agrees in emphasizing the harmony: “It seems to me to be a production and a beauty, the shots, all the settings, the aesthetics, the handling of color. Everything is very elegant”. Entering the character of Alba Flores, Katerina, she tells that the first time she read it she thought that she “was a green dog” of which she was not going to have any reference and with whom she “did not want to make the path evident”. And so, Almost at the last moment, what Caro defines as “an accident that went well” happened, and that was inventing an accent for Katerina. The idea arose from the method that Flores usually uses and which consists of being inspired by nature and animals: “There was something that I think was good for this character that is related to predation and something that many animals use, like camouflage. that flashes the other and leaves him clueless and that’s when he attacks. And this interested me, putting a camouflage so weird that the other doesn’t know what to do. They let me do it and I think it went well. ” The final verdict is now in the hands of the public.
