Good news! Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez’s literary masterwork “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is being adapted into a period drama series for Netflix. The one hundred year-long setting means the historical drama will travel through the Victorian, Edwardian, First World War, Interwar, and Second World War eras. Sounds like a dream come true for period drama fans.
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The story, set from around 1850 to 1950, centers on seven generations of the Buendía family. José Arcadio Buendía is the patriarch who founded the fictitious, isolated, Colombian town of Macondo where the action takes place, but the spirit of whole family places them amidst the important actions of Colombian historical events.
Alongside the family’s births, deaths, love affairs, and marriages, viewers can expect to see the Buendías live through the Liberal political reformation of a colonial way of life (and the nineteenth-century arguments for and against it), the arrival of the railway to a mountainous country, the Thousand Days’ War (1899–1902), the advent of the cinema, the introduction of the automobile, and the military massacre of striking workers as government–labour relations policy. Just imagine the range of costumes we will see throughout the new series.
García Márquez’s sons Rodrigo Garcia and Gonzalo García Barcha will serve as executive producers on the new period series, which will be filmed mainly in Colombia, in Spanish.
“For decades our father was reluctant to sell the film rights to Cien Años de Soledad because he believed that it could not be made under the time constraints of a feature film, or that producing it in a language other than Spanish would not do it justice,” said Garcia. He continued, “But in the current golden age of series, with the level of talented writing and directing, the cinematic quality of content, and the acceptance by worldwide audiences of programs in foreign languages, the time could not be better to bring an adaptation to the extraordinary global viewership that Netflix provides.”
This sounds like Netflix will not only be faithful to the narrative, but will embrace the novel’s imaginative style of magical realism.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” was first published in 1967 and since that time has sold an estimated 50 million copies around the world and has been translated into 46 languages. The beloved and acclaimed novel is considered to be one of the most significant works of the 20th century. The book is available here.
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If you enjoyed this post, be sure to see The Period Films List,with the best British, historical and costume dramas sorted by era.
