The successful Spanish-Portuguese co-production will be available on the “Europa Europa” channel across Latin America.
RTVE has reached an agreement with AMC Networks Latin America for the thriller Sequía, which will be broadcast throughout Latin America on the “Europa Europa” channel, part of the AMC Networks International – Latin America portfolio.
Sequía, or Drought in English, is the first co-production between RTVE and the Portuguese public broadcaster RTP. The two public televisions, together with two production companies, Atlantia Media and Coral Europa, have joined their efforts and teams to achieve this magnificent result. The production was shot entirely in natural settings in the Madrid region, Extremadura and Lisbon. A true feast for the senses, with ingredients of love, ambition, betrayal, greed and an unsolved crime.
The stars include Elena Rivera, winner of the Ondas and Iris awards for best actress in 2022, as well as Rodolfo Sancho, Marco D’Almeida, Miryam Gallego and Miguel Ángel Muñoz.
A prolonged drought causes the Campomediano reservoir, straddling the border between Spain and Portugal, to dry up and the village that was flooded after its construction to emerge. This leads to a macabre discovery: two mummified corpses with bullet wounds. Inspector Daniela Yanes and investigative reporter Óscar Santos suspect that the bodies may be linked to the environmental protests that took place to prevent the creation of the reservoir. However, Portuguese policeman Hélder comes with a secret mission that could provide another angle: one of the deceased could be the heir to the Souza Cardoso fortune who disappeared many years ago. “Even if the light does not reach the bottom, the truth always emerges”
Here are multi-faceted characters who cannot shake off their nature and are victims of circumstances that some thought had been long forgotten, and others, newly discovered. The narrative is set in two different times: the late 1990s and the present, where all the secrets begin to be revealed. It is a world that cannot be seen in black and white, as we all live in shades of grey and are the fruit of our nature and circumstances, moved by emotions that do not always place us on the right side of our own history…
The series shows us two influential families from Spain and Portugal, who inhabit the most beautiful and emblematic areas of both countries, but also the day-to-day life of an underclass that does the dirty work and traverses the poor neighbourhoods and degraded areas that exist on either side of the border. In the middle of the two worlds are the Spanish and Portuguese police, attempting to unravel the truth without being influenced or pressured, endangering their own lives and dealing with their own professional conflicts, frustrations and personal longings.
Joaquín Llamas, the director of the series, explains that Sequía arises from the need to include a cyclical problem that has a brutal impact on certain areas, the lack of rain and poor water management, using it as a starting point and trigger for a story that affects people on both sides of the border. The series is “a blend of thriller and ‘family noir'”. “A new take on the crime genre. The aim is to reach the viewer directly, not so much through the plot but through ‘the emotional journey’ of its protagonists,” he says.
The actors in the series agree that, fortunately, language was not a barrier when it came to producing the series, especially since almost all the Portuguese crew spoke Spanish. But the most remarkable thing for everyone is the union that was brought to the team through travelling and being enriched by both ways of working. Elena Rivera told us, laughing, that when she arrived in Lisbon she didn’t understand the language at all, but little by little she got an ear for it and in the end she understood it almost perfectly. She had the complicity of her Portuguese co-star, the actor Marco D’Almeida.
The series was watched in its Spanish première by 1.3 million people, along with the 3 million views through RTVE Play. The series première in Portugal drew 400,000 viewers.
