Netflix has commissioned a series on Gabriel Garcia’s Marquez’s acclaimed novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the streaming platform announced on Wednesday. The series will be in Spanish, and will be filmed mainly in Colombia, where Marquez was born in 1927 and spent his formative years before moving to Mexico. The writer’s sons, Rodrigo Garcia and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, will serve as executive producers on the series, the platform added in a press release.
Marquez’s masterpiece was published in Spanish in 1967 and translated into English three years later. It traces seven generations of the Buenida family between the 1820s and the 1920s, alongside providing an overview of Latin American history. The novel has never been adapted for the screen, except indirectly as the Japanese film Farewell to the Ark by Shuji Terayama.
Marquez died in 2014. “For decades our father was reluctant to sell the film rights to Cien Años de Soledad because he believed that it could not be made under the time constraints of a feature film, or that producing it in a language other than Spanish would not do it justice,” Rodrigo Garcia said in a press statement. “But in the current golden age of series, with the level of talented writing and directing, the cinematic quality of content, and the acceptance by worldwide audiences of programs in foreign languages, the time could not be better to bring an adaptation to the extraordinary global viewership that Netflix provides.”
Rodrigo Garcia is an established director, with several films to his credit, including Nine Lives (2005), Mother and Child (2009) and Alfred Nobbs (2011). Garcia has also worked in television in such shows as Six Feet Under, Blue, In Treatment and The Affair.
Francisco Ramos, Vice President, Spanish Language Originals for Netflix, said the series would be the “perfect match of project and our platform”. Netflix has been working hard on notching up viewers in Spanish-speaking markets through the series Narcos, the upcoming Alma, and Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. Netflix claims to have 139 million paid memberships in over 190 countries across the world.