Chinchiná, Colombia.
dozens of farmers with masks they remain motionless under the midday sun in a downtown coffee shop Colombia.
Suddenly, a voice exclaims, “Outside mouthpieces, let’s record! “. Les soap operas revive in one of the greatest referents of this industry a Latin America, after the pandemic paralysis.
Coffee with a woman’s aroma, An adaptation of the famous soap opera written in the nineties by Colombian Fernando Gaitán, It is being recorded in the municipality of Chinchiná, Caldas, in the center-west of the country.
the soap operas occur with asepsis, covid-19 tests, Restriction on gauging, masks, fluffy suits, budgets adjusted for the crisis and a permanent risk, very far from the romanticism which characterizes their stories.
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In May, when the country was crossing the second month of a confinement that paralyzed the shootings, That day seemed far away.
“When we can really start recording is because everything happened, because there’s a vaccine,” he said at the time in the AFP Guillermo Restrepo, RCN channel’s presidential adviser, where this soap opera will be broadcast.
But in September the restrictions imposed by the government from March 25 were relaxed and the producers undertook a gradual 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 going to start recording in April, which is just ten days before we started (…) we were quarantined for almost six months,” recalls Yalile Giordanelli, executive producer of “Coffee shop“.
according to National Media Association the confinement ordered by the government in late March forced RCN already its competitor snail to stop 38 productions.
Many of the 270 employees at Coffee with a woman’s aroma they were on a recording set when the news broke.
“They told us to pick up everything, that we were going around the house, but at that moment it was temporary (…) As the time got longer it became a bit bleak,” recalls Adriana Ortiz, makeup designer.
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According to Ortiz, the channel maintained its contract during the months of inactivity, albeit with a reduced salary. “It was time to tighten my belt a bit,” recalls the 54-year-old make-up artist.
Several of his colleagues did not run with the same luck.
According to the National Administrative Department of Statistics, the arts and entertainment sector was among the hardest hit by the pandemic: a total of 203,000 jobs were destroyed between October 2019 and the same month in 2020.
– Confidence test –
Audiovisual productions quarrel with social distancing.
Makeup artists, costume designers and actors depend on physical proximity to function and dozens of people concentrate on the set to illuminate and record each sequence.
On the other side of the camera, Laura Londoño and William Levy, the protagonists of “Coffee”, they converse without a mask a few inches apart, anticipating the romance that will unite their characters Paloma and Sebastià.
“If we were astronauts then we would have other distances but we are actors, we work with the voice, with the body,” says Katherine Velez, who plays Carmenza, the mother of Paloma.
Faced with the impossibility of distancing, the whole team is subjected to a PCR test on Mondays.
Although most sleep in the hacienda where the soap opera, el shooting it’s not a bubble: everyone can go out on their days off to see their families.
According to Giordanelli, regular testing has had “enormous costs”, but it is necessary: a contagion could force isolate any of the actors and would delay all production, an even higher price.
Mauricio Cruz, director of the soap opera, considers it vital that rehearsals make the actors feel comfortable in close contact scenes.
“Yesterday to do some promotions there was kissing scene but (…) the exam had been before yesterday then (…) we were very confident,” Cruz says.
Actress Velez knows it’s impossible shield the shooting against the virus, But says that when standing in front of the camera “everyone (is) without a mouthpiece, confident that production has control of the situation as much as possible.”
– Reality and fiction –
The soap operas its survival is at stake in a certain contradiction.
“Because people are locked in the house saw more television (…) but on the other hand, let’s say that the industry in general, companies (…), stopped investing in advertising “due to the economic crisis, explains the producer Giordanelli.
This has meant reduced budgets for productions, which also face logistics costs multiplied by the pandemic.
But the virus not only upset revenue and schedules, it also crept into fiction.
The librettists of “Coffee shop“They had to rewrite party scenes and big social events to accommodate small family reunions.
The new version is, in the words of its producer, “a much more collected, intimate story”, a faithful reflection of the difficult situation in which it was recorded.