“This series is a plea for historical memory and to promote the dignity of people”, describes Maykol Hernández to the series The nights of Tefía. The story finds its metamorphosis at a given moment due to coincidences: the celebration of Pride in contrast to the questioning of the rights of the LGTB+ collective and the recovery of the discourse at the same time as the disavowal suffered by the past. The audiovisual production is about to finish filming in August after finishing the recording outdoors in the south of Tenerife, recreating the dunes, suffocation and impunity of the Francoist concentration camp in Fuerteventura.
The plot, directed by Miguel del Arco and Rómulo Aguillaume, took its origin from the book Journey to the center of infamy. The author of that volume was Miguel Ángel Sosa, the name of the journalist who plays Maykol Hernández in fiction as a tribute. The reporter initiates an investigation and gets in touch with Airam, the protagonist, so that he can narrate his experiences in what is known as the Tefía Penitentiary Agricultural Colony, where those convicted by the law of vagrants and thugs of the dictatorship between 1954 and 1966. “One of the great invitations of the series is that the past cannot be forgotten, and the best way to forget, if it has to be done, is to remember,” he clarifies.
The series orbits between two time lines that draw from the past and are set in the 1960s and in the year 2004. Therefore, with the exterior scenes completed last Saturday that recreate the vast desert of the island of Majorera, now the team moves to Madrid to shoot the interiors of the action. In the company of a cast led by Jorge PerugorríaMarcos Ruiz, Roberto Álamo, Ana Wagener and Carolina Yuste, which has an outstanding Canarian presence with Luifer Rodríguez, Elisa Cano or Isaac Dos Santos, among others, there is a performer who performs for the first time with his Canarian accent even though he is a native from the earth.
The visibility of LGTBI rights
Horacio Colomé has lived in Mexico for three years after participating, for example, in If they let us Y Rich people cry too and has lived abroad for more than ten years after leaving Empresariales and betting everything on acting. When he learned about the project, he did not hesitate to embark on this adventure with which he crossed the continent with a bleak background. “There are not usually many series where such important social issues are dealt with,” says the actor who has just performed the play How not to be Montgomery Clift? where he embodies the American actor who in the 50s suffered from the Hollywood witch hunt.
Keeping so present the next June 28, in commemoration of the Stonewall riots, the story continues to be a testimony against the repression suffered by the collective. In addition, it coincides with the work carried out by the Diversity area of the Government of the Canary Islands in the line Strategy of the historical memory of sexual and gender dissidence in the Canary Islands inside the provincial archives and the exhibition of the majorera association Axis Mundi Neither Vagas Nor Rogues in the municipality of Galdar.
“Back then, it was hell not being able to externalize your being and, suddenly, I find myself in this concentration camp in Fuerteventura with these people who were sentenced, raped and mistreated. We are still in a world where there is a lot of homophobia and machismo, so it’s time to release a series like this and get this message out,” Colomé underlines. On this point he agrees with Maykol Hernández, since “although ghosts are appearing on the horizon that refuse to accept this, we no longer live in that time.” “The freedom of expression and sexual orientation are at another point, so any manifestationwhether it’s group or go hand in hand, it’s a knock on the table on that.”
The commitment to a story made about and from the Canary Islands has rarely been seen in national fiction. After the success of Iron, Eight years -still to be released- or the film the skin of the volcano, Hernández understands that this is an unprecedented moment in the history of cinema in the Islands, but warns, “this does not mean that we have a cinematographic industry in conditions”. From a positive perspective, he differentiates between foreign and regional productions so as not to fall into dependence on tax incentives, “the most interesting thing is to combine both things.” From an international point of view, Colomé identifies the same opportunities without forgetting “talent both artistically and technically so that little by little we are also capable of producing” and, in short, have a strong economic and business structure.
