‘Glória’, a series that puts Portugal on the map – from streaming and from the 20th century
João Vidal turns in Africa. The young engineer goes to war because he decides to go to war. Unlike other boys your age, you don’t have to. He is the child of good families, there are expedients. The father is the director of the PIDE, a Secretary of State for Defense will come. But João does not go because he is in line with the idea of empire of the Estado Novo. No. He goes because he wants to see with his own eyes what is happening in Ultramar. For him, Cabinda. It goes, and when it comes back, it comes inside out – politically and emotionally. It finds two solutions for the new situation it finds itself in: alcohol, like so many others, and the Portuguese Communist Party, like so many others. Later, when we met him, in Lisbon, the KGB had already recruited him as a secret agent operating in the halls – that is, in the heart – of the dictatorship. João then finds a way to be hired for RARET, a relay center managed by the USA in the small town of Glória do Ribatejo, from where Rádio Livre Europe was broadcast beyond the Iron Curtain. She has a mission: to find out what happened to Mia, also a KGB spy, there as a telegraph operator, who disappeared without the Americans, Soviets or Portuguese knowing her trail. This is the starting point for the first Portuguese series on Netflix, Glory, which opens this Friday, the 5th.
The story around fiction is real. RARET operated for nearly half a century under the undeclared command of the CIA. The rubble is there to be seen, as is the village built in the revelations to house the Americans. The latter has been rehabilitated (enough) to accommodate the shooting of the series. Not RARET (although some scenes were shot there, as part of a local secret, it was too big to film and it was a small old wave center of the RDP, in Pegões, doing the times). A secret place that Pedro Lopes, the creator of the series, used to hear adults talk about when he was a kid, between reports of Volta a Portugal in Bicycle and the Festival da Canção. The family worked at the National Broadcaster. For almost a decade and a half as content director at SPi, the screenwriter has done everything, but kept the idea of delving into this story until he found the “right environment” to develop, as he told us recently. That is, until I could do a series without looking at ways. He found it on Netflix, which he pitched with RTP as co-producer. Tiago Guedes was called back to perform at Ribatejo after the homestead.
Glory it takes place in the 1960s. The Cold War divides the world and Portugal, after all, was not as neutral or as lonely as it was said. It played a role, giving up territory to two strategic operational centers for the US: RARET and Lajes Base. Victoria Guerra, who embodies Mia, believes that this crossing with reality will have an impact on viewers. “I think they’ll like it, I really think. Because it brings together the side of espionage, which the public likes all over the world, and the historical side, which is super important nowadays, so that people don’t forget”, he told Time Out. Miguel Nunes, who plays the protagonist , was also attracted by that time: “I was very excited about the idea of this project since the castings. I started to get very involved with the character’s story, with the path he was taking and with this whole political moment, because it is a very determining phase also for the one we live in today, the period of the 60s and 70s, later with the April Revolution”.
It’s not a pamphlet series. “The starting point was kind of dangerous, because you’re talking about the CIA and the KGB, and so it’s already polarized in some way. But João is exactly that center [que procurámos para a história]. It starts from one side, and its progression takes it nowhere ”, explains Tiago Guedes. If it was difficult to maintain equidistance in relation to agents from abroad, it was more difficult to face the Portuguese dictatorship. However, in the four episodes that Netflix made available to the press (out of ten), the idiosyncrasies of the Estado Novo are subtly represented, often without framing or explanation. How characters act naturally in the face of normal. The subordinate position of women is a good example of this, whether at the top of RARET (Portuguese ver), or in the instrumental character that some of them were for boys of age to be mobilized for war (marrying them, to remove them from the line of the front) or in the terror of domestic violence. Carolina Amaral, Leonor Silveira, Sandra Faleiro, Joana Ribeiro and Stephanie Vogt are some of the women in the cast, along with Afonso Pimentel, Adriano Luz, Marcello Urgeghe, Adriano Carvalho, João Arrais or Matt Rippy. The first to appear on the screen is, however, another. A guest: Tiago Rodrigues. It’s a surprise to open and another feather in the hat of the director and future director of the Festival d’Avignon.
Netflix. Sex (Debut T1)
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