Madrid, Nov 7 (EFE) – The life of aid workers in countries in conflict, their passions and contradictions are seen from fiction in “Promesas de arena”, the series that premieres next Monday, Nov. 11, starring Andrea Duro, Daniel Grao and Blanca Portillo and based on the novel of the same name by Laura Garzón.
“The landscape is another protagonist that influences the characters and we have sought beauty in them within the horror of war,” said Portillo at Thursday’s presentation of the filming in Tunisia, which becomes fiction in Libya, where the aid workers arrive to work in the hospital of the NGO Global Action.
Portillo plays Julia, a veteran in charge of supplies at the center but “with a hidden mission that obsesses her” and she will be the one to receive the new aid workers.
Lucía is one of the young women who arrives at her mission full of expectations and is brought to life by Andrea Duro, who defines her as “a girl who starts with many doubts, not knowing her place in the world and goes to the NGO to live the experience and everything that happens to her ends up turning her into another woman”.
One of these experiences is her unbridled passion for Hayzam, an ambiguous ex-military man who is not committed to anyone and whose magnetism will make her fall into his nets. The Italian Francesco Arca gets into the skin of this character who, according to him, “lives in an unstable balance between good and evil”.
Duro’s character will also fall in love with Andy, the head of the camp played by Daniel Grao, who is “very analytical and tries to postpone emotions” and who within the series “serves to show how many times these people who help outside the home are running away from something or from themselves”.
The group of aid workers is also joined by Berta, “a gynecologist without filters who arrives because she wants to help and ends up discovering that it is the trip that has helped her,” according to her interpreter, Thais Blume.
The team of collaborators is completed by Jaime, a young homosexual who will face contrasts because “in Spain he is fine with his homosexuality and there he must hide it”, according to his actor Marcel Borrás; and Diego, who will provide “the necessary relief to release the tension of the rest of the plots”, as explained by Jairo Sánchez, who has stepped into his shoes.
The series co-produced by TVE with Atlantia Media has recreated in the oasis of Tozeur and in the port city of Sfax, both in Tunisia, the fictitious city of Fursa, where most of the filming took place.
“The environment has an influence, but there are no evaluations,” explains Amparo Miralles, executive producer of Atlantia Media, who adds that “what is presented is fiction and as such is different from the real life of these aid workers”.
To show this realistic side of the story, each episode will be followed by “Titanes sin frontera” (Titans without borders), which narrates the real lives of several Spanish volunteers through their own statements, “although they don’t like the name titans because they don’t feel like heroes,” Miralles concludes.
