"Isabel": the life of a writer seen through the screens

The private life, external struggles and internal conflicts of the Chilean Isabel Allende were the basis for the creation of this series starring Daniela Ramírez and directed by Rodrigo Bazaes.

“I never fit anywhere, not in the family, social class or religion that touched me; I did not belong to the gangs that cycled down the street; the cousins did not include me in their games; I was the least popular girl in school and afterwards I was for a long time the one who danced the least at parties, more because she was shy than because she was ugly, I prefer to suppose ”.

This is how the Chilean writer Isabel Allende stated it twenty years ago, as an autobiographical confession, in the opening part of her book My Invented Country . They appear there, among other moments of his existence, memories of his childhood and adolescence that he apparently kept very clearly, as if he had since then had the strange intuition that one day he could tell them, why not, in one or several books that arrive. in the reading eyes of many people.

What he never came to imagine, neither in that time nor in another, was that those memories marked by an intense feeling of uprooting would reach the small screen (and other screens: computers, electronic tablets, cell phones, etc.), and were available to be seen by millions of people who currently have access to entertainment platforms that did not even exist two decades ago.

Isabel, this is the title of the series that narrates the life of the writer, which will be available on Amazon Prime Video from June 4 for Spain and Latin America. In an interview with El Espectador , Allende commented on her first impressions of this audiovisual production: “I was very scared, as you can imagine, because my life is exposed; but not only mine, but the lives of other people around me who have private lives, such as my ex-husband, Paula’s husband (her deceased daughter), my son and so many people who appear in the series; So I was afraid for them, but it seems to me that they did something with a lot of respect and with a lot of dignity, so I’m happy with that ”.

The series was directed by the Chilean Rodrigo Bazaes (co-writer of the films Violeta went to heaven and The Good Life ), and starring actress Daniela Ramírez, who plays Isabel Allende. Also performing are Néstor Cantillana, Rodolfo Pulgar, Rosario Zamora and Paola Volpato, all from Chile. The writer, for her part, says that she only participated as a spectator, but points out that she was satisfied with the final result.

“I had no participation in the creation of the series. I had to see it finished, edited, with the music, with everything, and it impressed me well ”. The story will be told in three one-hour chapters and, according to the Amazon Prime Video press team, “it focuses on the struggle and passion of Allende, who, willing to break the social rules of the time in order to achieve his happiness, that of her loved ones and doing justice in the face of the political conflicts in which she is involved, finds in literature an escape route to heal and rediscover herself ”.

Follow the news of El Espectador on Google News

It is not the first time that Isabel Allende’s work has been related to an audiovisual project, since some of her literary creations had already been the subject of film adaptations ( La casa de los espíritus , in 1993, and De amor y de sombra , in nineteen ninety five). However, what is something new for the writer and for the audience is the fact that this recent production narrates momentous moments in her own life and not the fiction of her books.

“It’s different, because that’s where my life is supposed to be; So it is not the same as The House of the Spirits when a movie was made, or Of Love and Shadows , or when an opera has been made with a short story or ballet, it is another creator who makes something from an idea that I had, but it is not the original text, it is transformed. In the case of the series, they were based on the memoirs that I have written (two) and also on all the material they got in my office, which were hundreds of photographs, videos, interviews … and with that they reconstructed the time. Everything is very well done ”.

Likewise, he recognized that it was not easy to see certain specific passages of his life reflected on the screen. “I came across some moments that when seen visually are very strong, for example all the scenes in which Paula appears ill, in which she appears when she falls into a coma, in which she dies at the end; it broke my heart to see them again ”.

Isabel Allende says, at another point in My Invented Country : “In the slow exercise of writing I have dealt with my demons and obsessions, I have explored the corners of memory, I have rescued stories and characters from oblivion, I have stolen the lives of others And with all that raw material I have built a site that I call my homeland. I’m from there ”.

Surely there, in Isabel , you will be able to see a good part of all that: an intense and particular life, full of social and personal struggles, this time with shots and counter shots, dialogues and silences, ellipsis, flashbacks and music, of course, between other narrative resources of audiovisual language. Thus, viewers will be first-rate witnesses of the literary vocation of this writer. She ends, almost at the end of the same book, with lines that reveal a certain enigmatic character, as if keeping the last word of what her life has been, this time only seen in the light of herself: “In any case, the most An important part of my journey through this world does not appear in my biography or in my books, it happened almost imperceptibly in the secret chambers of the heart ”.

A young Isabel, in the days of a journalist

Isabel Allende has published 26 books; his novels and stories have been taken to the cinema and to other artistic settings; and now the series Isabel is released, which amply shows a long and successful career. In addition to all this, there is a facet that is perhaps not so well known, and that is his journalistic practice. It was in Paula magazine, between 1967 and 1974, where she served as editor of interviews, articles, reports and even commented on decoration issues. In this way, Allende recalled those moments in his life: “It was a very happy time; It was a time of discoveries, of curiosity, of feeling integrated into a community, of learning. It was the discovery of an articulated feminism that could be transformed into action to change the Chilean culture of the moment; all that was a very beautiful time. Also, I had small children, I was in love with my husband… Then came the military coup (in Chile) and my life shot in another direction, but up to that moment it was a beautiful time of my life, the most beautiful of all ”.