About a month after the premiere of the documentary series Juan Gabriel: I have to, I can, I want todirected by María José Cuevas, continues to accumulate successes. With more than four million views worldwide, and a mass purge of more than 170,000 people in the “Zócalo” with the symbolic Divo de Juárez concert showing, the Netflix project ranked in the top 10 globally in its first two weeks. Bernardo Loyola (Mexico City, 48 years old), director of documentaries for the platform in Latin America, confirms that, beyond audience metrics, the greatest satisfaction is the “cultural moments” that these types of stories generate: “Getting parents, who are recommended in your family chat, that the person who paints your nails, which is not usually the audience one might think of for documentaries, is talking about this, and that is exactly what we aspire to.”
The task was not easy. In a video call with EL PAÍS, Loyola said that the idea that came from him took more than six years of work for the project to become a reality. Since his debut on Netflix in 2018, it has been clear to me that Juan Gabriel was one of the characters who still had a story to tell. The opportunity would come a few years later when he obtained a hard drive with a preview of the file that was in the possession of the Mexican idol’s family. “There were some Super 8 songs when I was young, and there was some stuff when I was an adult, too. That scene where he sings I have to do it “On the plane, it’s like a sheepskin romper,” he says. There was a lot of material left over.
Given the enormity of everything they had, what was initially intended to be a feature film became a four-part series that aligned with Netflix’s documentary genre strategy. “This project reflects exactly what we are looking to do with our documentary strategy here in Mexico and Latin America, which is to produce documentaries that have the potential to reach a massive audience,” he explains. Although he stresses that each project is different from the other, he emphasizes that the team’s passion and creativity are necessary to achieve “an emotional connection with people,” and gives another example: Lost childrena documentary about four children who survived 40 days in the Colombian Amazon after a plane crash. “It’s the most watched non-English documentary on Netflix in history. A lot of people watched it in Colombia, but 80% of the audience also came from abroad. It was a truly global phenomenon,” he commented.
Loyola sees this kind of “human interest” bet as showing that it can “reach large audiences with challenging stories” that come from more mainstream topics like crime or music, as is the case with other successful productions on the platform such as The three deaths of Marisela Escobedo also Carol Gee: Tomorrow was so beautiful. Moreover, he emphasizes that the compass of his documentaries “is curiosity and empathy, above pathology, gossip or exploitation.” He stresses that there is no “formula” or “algorithm” that guarantees the success of any project, not even the fame of the novel’s protagonist: “It is clear that Karol G is famous by 70 million people.” following (followers) on Instagram, and she is one of the most famous singers in Latin America. Obviously he’s attractive, but then it becomes like: Is he really going to tell his story? Is she willing to be vulnerable, to give you access?”
For the director, who previously worked with the famous American documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, Netflix was able to popularize the genre so that it was not “niche” and “the barrier of access to watching a documentary was broken” in Latin America, because previously, its distribution was limited to festivals and art fairs due to the limited resources he had. Loyola chronicles around 2018 changes in audiences for documentaries in the region that brought the numbers closer to those for fiction: “We’re going with the idea that what we’ve seen in the United States and England with documentaries in English Wild, wild country, Made a killer and Chef’s tablewhich began to communicate with increasingly larger audiences. “We thought we could do something similar in Latin America.” And so like the stories 1994 in mexico, Carmel: Who killed Maria Marta? In Argentina and Elise Matsunaga: Once upon a time there was a crime In Brazil.
As for the next launches, Loyola is in the spotlight Son of his owna story about motherhood directed by two-time Academy Award nominee Maite Alberdi. Lali: The one who beats timeAbout the famous Argentine singer who filled Velez Stadium five times in one year, Ya Morano: Death at TeatimeIt is directed by Alejandro Hartmann and tells the story of an Argentine woman who poisoned her friends after deceiving them. James Rodrigueza documentary series that follows the well-known Colombian player. Regarding the latter, he said: “It is part of the projects that we will implement on our way to the World Cup. We have different projects in post-production around the World Cup.”