It was probably inevitable that Rodrigo Sorogoyen conceived his new work, ‘Los años nuevos’, during a New Year’s Eve celebration. “It was in 2015,” he recalled today at the Venice Film Festival. “I was spending the holidays in Marrakech with my partner at the time and suddenly, thinking about my New Year’s Eves over the last 10 years, I realized that through those 10 days you could understand what my life had been like during that entire decade.” The result of that revelation is ‘New Years’, the second series of his filmography to date – the first, ‘Riot police’, It is one of the most critically and publicly acclaimed Spanish productions in that format in recent times; its premiere in the Show This is the third visit to the festival by the Madrid-born filmmaker, who presented his fifth feature film, ‘Madre’, in 2019, and in 2022 was part of its official jury.
Divided into two parts of five episodes each, the first of them introduces us to Ana -played by Iria del Río- and Oscar -played by Francesco Carril-, two young people in their early thirties who meet on the last night of 2014; and each of the following episodes takes place exactly one year after the previous one, during the course of that same day or the next. “I decided to have the series cover that specific period in the characters’ lives because I think that, for most people, from when we turn 30 until we turn 40 “Things happen to us that change our lives in crucial ways,” Sorogoyen says. “You accumulate heartbreaks, you start a family, you lose someone important in your life, that kind of thing.”
Something like a daring mix between ‘Secrets of a Marriage’ (1974), by Ingmar Bergman, and the trilogy ‘Before…’, by Richard Linklater, ‘Los años nuevos’ is at times tender, at times painful and at all times dazzling as it speaks of, among many other issues, the harm we sometimes cause to those we love, what it means to be a son but also what it means to be a father, the need to wipe the slate clean and the impossibility of leaving the past behind; and the empathy that it awakens in the process has as much to do with the great acting work of Del Río and Carril as with Sorogoyen’s talent as a narrator. “I felt very comfortable filming it,” confesses the latter, who wrote the series with Paula Fabra and Sara Cano and behind the camera he had the help of Sandra Romero and David Martin de los Santos. “When I was in film school, I wanted to talk about these kinds of stories, and I am still very interested in romantic drama even though circumstances have made my career move in another direction,” she adds, referring to her successes thanks to thrillers such as ‘Que Dios nos perdone’ (2016) and ‘As Bestas’ (2022).
Produced by Movistar+‘The New Years’ still does not have a definitive release date, although it is known that before its television premiere it will be shown in cinemas. “I admit that, when filming it, at no point did I take into account that many people would end up watching it on very small screens,” explains the director. “In fact, from the beginning it was conceived as a cinematic work.”
