Chinchiná, Colombia.
Dozens belching with mask stay motionless in the midday sun on a downtown coffee plantation Colombia.
Suddenly a voice calls: “Mask off, let’s record! ” tv soaps revived in one of the most important references of this industry in Latin America, after the paralysis from the pandemic.
coffee smelling of women, an adaptation of the famous telenovela written in the 1990s by the Colombian Fernando Gaitán, is included in the municipality of Chinchiná, Caldas, in the mid-west of the country.
The soap operas are produced aseptically, covid-19 testing, capacity constraints, masks, anti-liquid packs, tight budgets due to the crisis and a permanent risk, far from the romance that characterizes their stories.
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In May, as the country went through the second month of a lockdown affecting the to film, this day seemed far away.
“If we can really start recording, it’s because everything happened, because there is a vaccine,” he said at the time. AFP Guillermo Restrepo, adviser to the chairmanship of the RCN channel, where this telenovela will be broadcast.
But in September, restrictions imposed by the government since March 25 were relaxed and manufacturing companies gradually began to return to studies under strict protocols. Colombia currently has more than 1.5 million cases of Covid-19, with more than 42,000 dead.
– Sudden blow –
“We were supposed to start filming in April, that’s just ten days before we started (…) we were in quarantine for almost six months,” recalls Yalile Giordanelli, executive producer of “Cafe“.
According to National Association of Media the detention ordered by the government at the end of March RCN and your competitor Snail 38 productions stop.
Many of the 270 employees of coffee smelling of women They were on a recording set when the news fell.
“They said we had to collect everything, that we were going home, but at that point it was tentative (…) As the time got longer, it got a little bleak,” recalls Adriana Ortiz, makeup designer.
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According to Ortiz, the channel maintained his contract during the months of inactivity, albeit with a reduced salary. “She had to tighten her belt a little bit,” recalls the 54-year-old makeup artist.
Several of his colleagues have not suffered the same fate.
According to the National Administrative Division of Statistics, the arts and entertainment sector was one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, with a total of 203,000 jobs destroyed between October 2019 and the same month of 2020.
– Reliability test –
Audiovisual productions are at odds with social distance.
Makeup artists, costume designers, and actors rely on physical proximity to do their jobs, and dozens of people come together to illuminate and record each scene.
On the other side of the camera Laura Londoño and William Levy, the protagonists of “Café”, they talk without a mask a few inches apart, anticipating the romance that will unite their characters Paloma and Sebastián.
“If we were astronauts we would have different distances, but we are actors, we work with the voice, with the body,” said Katherine Vélez, who plays Carmenza, the mother of Paloma.
Given the impossibility to distance themselves, the entire team will be subjected to a PCR test on Monday.
Although most sleep on the farm where the soap, he to film It’s not a bubble: anyone can go out on their days off to see their family.
According to Giordanelli, regular testing has had “enormous costs”, but it is necessary: an infection can force isolate one of the actors and it would slow down all production, an even higher price.
Mauricio Cruz, director of the soap opera, finds it essential to conduct tests so that the actors feel comfortable in close contact scenes.
“There was a kiss scene yesterday to do some promotions, but (…) the exam had been the day before yesterday, then (…) we were sure,” says Cruz.
The actress Vélez knows that it is impossible protect the shoot from viruses, but assures that the moment we are in front of the camera, “everyone without masks (is) convinced that the production has as much control over the situation as possible.”
– Fact and Fiction –
The industry of tv soaps its survival is at stake in a certain contradiction.
‘When people are locked up in the house, I saw more TV (…) but on the other hand, let’s say the industry in general, companies (…), stopped investing in advertising “because of the economic crisis, explains producer Giordanelli.
This has led to lower budgets for productions, which also have to do with logistics costs multiplied by the pandemic.
But the virus not only disrupted revenues and schedules, it also slid into fiction.
The librettists of “Cafe“They had to rewrite the scenes of parties and big social events to accommodate small family gatherings.
The new version is, in the producer’s words, “a much more collected, intimate story,” a faithful representation of the difficult situation in which it was shot.