Garcia Marquez, promoter of the New LatAm Film Foundation

The thrilling and seductive magical realism recreated by Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is alluring in the world of film, an art form with which the 1982 Nobel Literature Prize winner had very close ties.

Revered by millions of readers thanks to works, such as Cien años de soledad and El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, García Márquez also left his imprint as a screenwriter, critic and promoter of the New Latin American Film Foundation (FNCL).

On December 4, 1985, during the FNCL’s opening in Cuba, the award-winning author recalled the time when he studied at the Experimental Film Center in Rome in the 1950s, and said that, at that time, “I wanted nothing more in life than to be the film director I never was”.

Although the dream of being a filmmaker never came true, the Colombian writer was able to see a considerable part of his literary production on the screen, although most of the times the versions fell short of his books.

The films inspired on his creative works are En este pueblo no hay ladrones (1965) by Mexico’s Alberto Isaac, and La viuda de Montiel (1979) by Chile’s Miguel Littin, which gained some international acclaim and up to a point captured the spirit of the novel, but seemed to be more than what it achieved.

Throughout the next decades, more movies were made on the basis of Gabo’s works, including Eréndira (1983), Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1987), Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (1988), El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1999) and Del amor y otros demonios (2009).

One of the best known films is Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), directed by British director, Mike Newell, and starring Spanish actor, Javier Bardem, whose most distinctive feature is perhaps the music score by Colombian singer Shakira, since the movie received bad reviews and didn’t capture the book’s atmosphere and feeling.

Perhaps because of these negative experiences, the writer was reluctant to bring to the screen his most praised creation, Cien años de soledad, full of complex characters and narrated at different times, with a structure that poses a big challenge in film language.

However, those who asked themselves what an audiovisual version of the novel would be like may be very close to knowing the answer, since the streaming platform Netflix is producing a series based on it.

In fact, last June the casting process began in Colombia to choose the actors for the project, which is planned for two seasons of 20 hours.

Let’s hope that this version will meet the demands of audiences in love with García Márquez’s literature, something that will surely only be achieved if the series manages to capture, at least in part, the fascinating world of the fictional town of Macondo and the joys, troubles and experiences of seven generations of the Buendía family.